Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7617011" data-attributes="member: 4937">No, I'm not.  I'm not making any sort of evasive argument.  The argument presented in the academic paper is fundamentally flawed.  It's true that victims will tell their torturers anything they think will make the torture stop including making stuff up and that in general it is difficult to tell when someone is lying.   However, that doesn't prove that torture fails to work.  In fact, on the contrary, the fact that cultures with a history of torture have known for centuries that torture has this flaw, means that cultures that have practiced torture techniques over that time have developed well conceived practices for dealing with the problems discussed in the paper.   All the academic paper really proves is that application of pain alone in order to obtain information results in a high rate of false positives.  However, that alone doesn't prove that torture doesn't work - it just proves that it requires relatively sophisticated intelligence and interrogation techniques to be successful.  Without going into the ugly details too deeply, briefly, if you want to get a particular piece of information, you avoid asking about it, especially early on before you've broken the subject.   Indeed, as with torturing Han, you might just begin by not asking them anything.  Once you do start asking questions, you begin with questions that, unknown to the subject you already have the answers to from other sources.  Essentially, you use control questions.  Once the subject begins to believe that there is no point in resisting, and that the cost of deception is unbearably high - and everyone will hit that point eventually - then you can get true answers with a very high probability of success.  If you add to this process some sort of electronic lie detection device, then it gets even more successful. This is the reason that soldiers are told that they can't hold out.  Everyone is going to break.  The trick is to make the process of breaking you take so long, that your information is no longer operationally useful.   Sufficiently well trained persons can defeat even sophisticated torture techniques, but not if they don't understand what is coming.  If on the other hand, they've read your book on how to do it, well then you are going to have a very hard time getting in their head.My fundamental point however is not really whether torture works or not.   I won't be interested in a lengthy discussion of that.   My fundamental point is that whether torture works or not is a tangential proxy discussion for what the OP really is setting out to prove.   Whether torture is a moral act doesn't really need to depend on whether it works or not.  I understand how if you are a pure utilitarian the argument that torture can be effective makes you uncomfortable, but most people don't base their morality on pure utilitarianism.   Likewise, whether torture works or not really has no bearing on whether torture should be a centerpiece of play in an RPG.</blockquote>

Verification