No, it is not in the terrain of lottery winners and broken clocks. That implies blind luck and pure chance. Torture can be predictably effective (at least as predictably effective as other methods) when used in appropriate circumstances.
I read that a better trick is to get someone to make friends with the bad guy. Learn their motives and get them to come over. Maybe make a deal to help them out.
Again, it was the very experienced guy in your cite that told everyone that torture does not work, it is then that seeing you tossing him under the bus what it is bullshit, it is like admitting that you did not pay attention to who you are citing, meaning that the other places were you get your spin are not reliable either. The evidence still shows that Torture is indeed much closer to “trying to hammer in nails by throwing rocks at them blindfolded” It is your say so against the very same guy that you cited and the vast majority of experts.
As one that applied game theory to the issue can tell you, it is.
No. And again you are relying on wishful thinking and that the ones applying the torture were experienced, that the anti vaccine people can be right on some items does not mean that the CDC is bullshitting us when they tell the people that using natural remedies does not work to prevent disease when viruses are the issue.
It* never *has been “predictably effective”.
The opinion piece was citing the work of professor Darius Rejali who has made it a centerpiece of his career to study this stuff and has written books on it.
So no, not opinion.
Indeed. The best interrogator the Germans had in WWII never used violence and instead was rather nice to his captives:
(Johnny Carson voice)" I did not know that!"
All I need is ONE case where torture extracted useful information to support the argument that torture works. Now you say "well that’s just coincidence but we have reliably gotten information from elite special forces in minutes using torture… consistently.
You need a study but the closest thing we get to a study is the results of SERE training where Navy SEALS give up the secret password within 2 minutes of being waterboarded.
Anecdote and the opinions of people who write books about how horrible torture is just opinion.
I don’t know this John Schiemann and I don’t see a link to his peer reviewed study but there is a lot of daylight between lottery ticket and what John Schiemann is describing. A FUCKLOAD of daylight.
ISTM that now that the “torture simply doesn’t work” crowd can’t really stand by that statement without adding all sorts of conditions that amount to “well torture doesn’t work well enough to really justify its use” which is really just a matter of opinion; they have retreated to “well sure torture works sometimes in the same way that a lottery ticket works sometimes or a clock is right twice a day” implying that torture only works by coincidence. This is clearly not the case.
Is there ANYTHING that will disprove their theory? Of course not. Every instance where information as gathered using torture was a coincidence and every case where it yielded bad information is proof positive that torture only sends us on wild goose chases.
Is there anything that will disprove mine? Sure, just prove that the Navy SEALS that give up their secret password within minutes of being waterboarded aren’t taking their SERE training seriously or that they are pussies compared to the average jihadist.
So now torture isn’t like a lottery ticket. Now people who think torture works are like people who think that vaccines don’t work.
The efficacy of vaccines are science. Where is your science on the inefficacy of torture?
You have any proof of that?
We know that Navy SEAL candidates seem to give up secrets when waterboarded for less than 2 minutes. Predictably.
Yes. I know. I even mentioned that this opinion piece was citing the author of “torture and democracy”. This guy isn’t trying to take an objective look at the efficacy of torture, he is trying to build a case against it ever being used under any circumstances anywhere. This isn’t science, its an argument. There are no facts there, just anecdote. I have anecdotes too.
That’s probably right.
Torture should not be your go to move.
You can attract more flies with honey than a blowtorch to the testicles.
But what do you do when friendly doesn’t work? Just go with what you have and hope for the best?
And that is an argument from ignorance, a lot of it has been made by you. Your remedy is to disparage people “that write books” in the hope that others will ignore the fact that the writers are experts in the matter and many other experts agree with them, what you need to do is to find evidence that contradicts the research that they and many others did.
Nope, the one that is not letting go of ignorance is you, again your “theory” is only to declare that what experts and even the ones you cite are spewing bullshit. But what is happening is that you are only wrong by the degree that you think that torture is effective.
One has to note here that you are admitting then that your position is absolute, but on the other direction: as a torture apologist; because you are indeed not accepting that in real life a subject can indeed have exceptions but no one is bullshitting when saying that in general torture does not work, just like in general the experts can say also that natural remedies are crappy against viruses, that nature is not driving the current global warming, that the stars are guiding our destiny, etc.
And so we come to what it is really going on, what me and others like DrDeth are pointing at is that there are indeed exceptions, just like in virtually all of science. What one has to do is to not deny the preponderance of the evidence and what the experts are reporting.
Again, historians have to look at the evidence and also point that:
again, what you only demonstrated is what happens when you have omniscience, not a real life situation indeed.
Again, posted before, but you are left by resorting that just because you do not access it it can be dismissed, others that look at the evidence report just what I said and link to the published science. One has to pay for access, but others already reported on the content and interviewed the author:
http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/2014/12/torture/
This has to be mentioned: You actually came from the side that claims that you are not pro torture, but anyone that has been involved dealing with pseudo science does know the tune:
And that is what is happening here IMHO. The anti vaccine metaphor is valid because the anti vaccine people can also point at very good examples of their natural solutions “working”; people that behave like this can be sincere, but nevertheless wrong.
The preponderance of the evidence in the torture case, is coming from several lines of inquiry (history, game theory, review of the recent torture apparatus, etc) and they do point to the conclusion that “torture does not work”, even if one does acknowledge that there are omniscient cases like the NAVY seals revealing a number, because we are dealing here with the real world.
Again, “that guy” is this: Darius Rejali, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Reed College
As pointed before his approach to the issue is mostly coming from history, the task of the one trying to make what he said as “just an argument” is to demonstrate that the historical record that he uses is a false one. He is using more than just anecdotes.
So besides getting recognition, anyone trying to discredit Darius Rejali also needs more than just anecdotes.
Correction: 2 post before I meant to say that:
“that the stars are ***not ***guiding our destiny, etc.”
One more comment to this:
[QUOTE=Damuri Ajashi]
All I need is ONE case where torture extracted useful information to support the argument that torture works.
[/QUOTE]
That demonstrates that you are only reaching for the peculiar idea that something “works” when it is in the same level as declaring that the lottery “works”. Again it does not deny that experts in finance can tell you (and it is not bullshit at all) that it is not a productive system to gain riches; while at the same time they can acknowledge that there are lottery winners out there.
You don’t torture them because torture does not provide reliable results unless verification can be done immediately (e.g. the combo to the safe that is in the same room).
The tortured victim will say anything to make the torture stop making their info near worthless. It takes time and effort for you, the torturer, to go out and see if what they told you is true. Wasting time and resources. By the time you hit on the right answer it is probably far too late to do you much good.
I provided you quotes of Napoleon and a colonel in Vietnam saying exactly this earlier. Here is another:
Gosh, yes. You get much better quality of intelligence out of surveillance than you do out of torture, because practising surveillance doesn’t introduce distortions into your enquiry which give your subject a strong incentive to make stuff up. Generally you’d have a lot more confidence - like, orders of magnitude more - in the info you get from surveillance than in the info you get from torture.
That’s not to say that you know with absolute certainty than any particular datum is correct. But it’s generally much more reliably useful than what you get from torture.
I don’t think you can say either “torture works” or “torture doesn’t work” unless you start by defining what you mean by “work”.
I think you also have to distinguish between a particular instance of torture, and the practice of torture as a policy. Torture may “work” in the sense that when we tortured X we got reliable datum Y, and yet not work in the sense that the programme of which the torture of X was one instance was, on the whole, much more damaging to our interests than useful to them, or in the sense that reliable datum Y was buried useless data A, B, C, D . . . and by the time we discovered that Y was reliable it has ceased to be of much value to us.
There is this tendency in the West to think that if something bad can be described by one negative adjective, it can be described by other unrelated negative adjectives as well.
And - missed the edit window on my earlier post - it’s probably also worth point out that, long before enlightenment notions of “human rights” became current, common law courts excluded evidence obtained by torture because it had such low probative value. So we have known for centuries that information obtained by torturing people is generally of very poor quality.
So, is there a reliable way of identifying which items of information gathered without torture are good? Well, the fact that it wasn’t obtained by torture already increases our confidence in it, when compared with information that was obtained by torture.