I’ve got three things to say in response, I’ll list them:
Most of the arguments against on this thread haven’t been good ones. I have pointed this out. (Yours are better ones than many, assuming your assertions were correct.) I don’t mean this as a serious criticism of anyone. It’s not a very serious subject, so it doesn’t warrant serious thought from most people.
Many if not most of my posts have just served to clarify the meaning of my OP rather than to defend it.
I’m using the responses as an aid to my practice of entertaining myself and others by spinning wild ideas. I don’t mean for this to be suprising to anyone. Also, to be clear, this is not my only purpose, just one of my purposes. I’ve kept it strictly, legitimately GQ: I asked a factual question (and gave a story explaining my motivation in asking it), and evaluated the validity of various attempts to answer that question (including answering attempts to undercut the support the act of asking the question was supposed to recieve from the story I gave as to its motivation).
Its hard to ask the following question without sounding defensive or smartass, so you’ll have to take my word for it, unfortunately, that my interest in the answer to the following question is utterly sincere and not at all pointed against you in any way. I just want to know: Why did you take this thread and my posts so seriously? I didn’t think I put them forth in a particularly serious way, and I didn’t think I wrote anything which might imply significant, full-bodied truth claims. Was I mistaken?
Further analysis of how the thread has gone. It does not support your characterization of my posts.
Here’s my question from the OP: Have studies been done on the effectiveness of e-meters in therapeautic contexts?
Included in my OP was an explanation as to why I was asking the question.
Here are the four kinds of answers I’ve recieved:
Scientology is a bunch of bunk.
I remember reading one time that they did studies on e-meters, and they didn’t work.
Here’s a link to a page about e-meters
The story you’ve told to explain why you’re asking your question shows that you were motivated to ask that question based on faulty information.
The last, number 4, is your own answer, of course. Assuming your assertions in your post were correct, your point is well taken. You didn’t really address my question though!
To answer number 1, the response I’ve given is: Okay, but that’s irrelevant. I’ve then gone on to clarify the intent of my OP to explain why its irrelevant.
To answer number 2, my response (which I did not post–this is just what I thought after reading it) is: Okay, but have you got a citation?
To answer number 3, I have a confession to make. I followed the link, found the page difficult to navigate given certain constraints on my time at that first reading, and subsequently forgot about it. I’ll give it another look.
Anyway, progress has been made on answering my question, thanks in large part to Exapno’s comments in his first post. I need to know what the research on lie detectors says. I wasn’t aware I needed to read up on that at first. I also might need to verify that e-machines don’t even count as “crude lie detectors.” Thanks go to Exapno! However, those thanks are somewhat dampened by my lack of appreciation for his decisions as regards tone and other aspects of his approach. But hey, what’s tone between internet acquaintances?
I can’t tell what your OP looked like from inside your head. Whatever you were thinking - an apparent mishmash of mis-understood scientific terms along with buying into the sheer propaganda behind the incredible notion that e-meters do anything at all - you were properly answered in the very first response. Which you say you completely blew off.
It was obvious to me, and to every other responder after, that you weren’t listening. This is guaranteed to increase irritability on the Dope.
Bottom line. Your post meant something to you. It came across as illiterate gibberish. That’s a hard gulf to bridge, especially if you dynamite the bridge before it reaches your side. A message board is not the best place to post this. And GQ, where you are cut no slack, is a really terrible place for it.
By the way, to anyone reading this thread, this link, found after hitting Diogenes’ link above, does a pretty good job explaining what E-meters do, and how they (don’t) work: The Scandal of Scientology / Chapter 18: The E-Meter
There’s no single thing they end up measuring, so it’s very difficult to see how they could be used for any purpose at all.
I have ideas as to how the e-meter might be defended, but this offends Exapno and I do not wish to offend.
Would have been fun though. Interesting. Good practice. Not dangerous in any way I can see. And perfectly legitimate GQ-ness, since it would involve evaluating the validity of a response to a question from a GQOP.
But alas.
(No seriously, I just don’t have the time or the inclination to think about it any more. And I think I’m the only one who cares anymore.)
Any chance we could get some specific cites or quotes on this? I haven’t read any recent issues of Scientific American or Discover, but everything I have read lately (mostly newspaper articles, granted) indicates that the psychiatric community has really been pulling away from support of the whole “repressed memory” theory in recent years.
It depends by what you mean as ‘repressed memory’.
For instance some articles report events like a child who’s been horribly abused when younger and theres definitive proof of the abuse, has no obvious memory of specific incidents, but will react very strongly to the abusive persons voice. This is argued as a version of it.
The problem is though, if we then get another child that strongly reacts to a parents voice, this doesnt mean we can therefore conclude that its because of a repressed memory of abuse as there are multiple other ways that reaction can presumably occur. And if you question them in a leading manner, its extremely easy to create a memory of events that never actually occurred, as has happened in many ‘recovered memory’ sexual abuse cases.
To give a simplistic example even if one believes in the concept, they may be remembering a bad scald and their parent telling them off, rather than anything directly abusive - they still react emotionally to the voice, but for very different reasons. If the method used cant reliably distinguish these kinds of things, its likely to cause more harm than it helps.
Which is why Im not sure how an E-meter would really help as such, even if it did reliably identify ‘unconscious’ emotional reactions or the like. From how its described, it cant really do much more than tell you that there may be something traumatic in the persons past. It cant tell you what that memory is without risking creating false memories instead, as its still based on an interviewer questioning the person and trying to figure out what caused the reaction, which is the method that caused so much trouble with repressed memory sexual abuse cases.
First, the assertion that lie detectors don’t work simply isn’t true. That’s why police use them. That’s why the FBI and CIA use them for security screenings. It’s true they’re not admissible in court, but that’s because the level of reliablity for scientific evidence is high, as is a concern juries would accord the evidence undue weight. Whereas in the contexts first mentioned, everyone understands lie detectors have limits and they are used for screening, not as decision makers. BTW, my understanding is that it’s much more difficult to fake out a lie detector than it is to be freaked out by one. IOW, few guilty people can sneak by one, but the machine will single out for suspicion folks who are not in fact guilty. Knowing this, someone who fails a test generally is put through a more thorough vetting, and may be denied clearance in the FBI/CIA contect, but will not be declared guilty based on the test alone.
As for an E-Meter. Yeah, it’s primitive, but not worthless. As it happens, I constructed a crude galvanometer with a Radio Shack electronics kits as a tyke. I’m telling you the darned thing actually could hit a target. (Twas Christmas. After I’d set it up the first time, Mom chimes in from another room, “Ask whether they snuck a look at their presents.” Meter jumps and speaker squeaks. But it’s noisy, so no one but me notices. Whew.) Combined with cold reading techniques, I’m neither surprised nor impressed that it produces results, of a sort.
The OP is asking, I gather, whether a mental health professional using modern equipment could develop this into a useful therapy. I, for one, think that’s a perfectly reasonable question. I’d love to hear the opinion of a mental health professional on the subject.
Good lord. I know people don’t like Scientology, but did everyone swallow fire-ants or something? Frylock asked an interesting question (or series of questions)–what is an e-meter, exactly (I’ve heard it described as a “crude lie-detector”); couldn’t a lie detector possibly have legitimate therapeutic uses? How interesting!–and every response seems to be “Scientology is crap, dumbass,” or “I heard once that they studied that long ago and found it to be crap, but I can’t be bothered to find any cites.”
A more useful response:
Hey, whaddaya know–people are promoting the use of polygraphs as part of post-conviction treatment for sex offenders.
How interesting! Does it work? Aren’t polygraphs unreliable? Is this appropriate? Couldn’t they be used for other types of psychiatric therapy? Etc. etc.?
Even if E-meters are, in fact, crap, the OPs question was interesting and could have led in interesting directions. Shame on all of you.
It’s true they’re not admissible in court, but that’s because the level of reliablity required for scientific evidence is high, and there is a concern juries would accord the evidence undue weight.
We answered what he actually did ask, not some variant that he could have asked had he only done even the most minimal search first to understand enough about the subject to formulate a better question. If you or he wants to ask the particular variant of the question that you bring up, feel free to do so.
However, that does not change the fact the actual OP question was about scientology and e-meters and not about lie detectors. Go back and read it.
And if that’s too much work, I’ll quote it for you:
That question was properly addressed and answered.
Exapno is right that I asked about e-meters rather than lie detectors. A direct answer to my GQ then would be as regards e-meters.
But it seems to me impossible to successfully argue that an answer about lie detectors is irrrelevant to my intention in asking the question, and shouldn’t be thought a welcome addition to the thread.
My mistake. From now on I’ll read only the last line of any OP, avoiding like the plague the lines directly preceding it, which state:
I’m off now to post the interesting auxilliary question Frylock raised in one sentence, using small words, so as not to waste anyone’s valuable time or brainpower.
