The U.S. government actively promotes public belief in the pseudoscience of polygraphy, and the press largely plays along.

Why is the government actively promoting that?

As for the press, they only play along if it fits their narrative. During that hearing Fox News framed polygraphs as pseudoscience while CNN was promoting it as evidence. Both sides will just as easily do the opposite the next time depending on what their audience wants to hear.

Polygraph is a placebo "eye of God watching you" to encourage confessions during interrogation. No more, no less. Like any placebo, it doesn't work (as well) if you know it's a placebo.

Either way, it's inadmissible in court. It's a technique for aiding in interrogation (like torture would be, if it worked), not a forensic technique for producing evidence.

Torture does work in cases where the information is verifiable. Consider for example that the interrogator has an encrypted file and a subject that knows the key.

Torture is morally abhorrent, but it's not necessarily ineffective.

"What's the decryption key?"

"I don't know."

I thought the placebo affect can still work (to some degree) even if you knew you were given a placebo.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...

Exactly as 3JPLW mentioned, government agencies value the polygraph as an aid to interrogation. Naïve and gullible persons, be they applicants for government jobs, criminal suspects, or criminals released on probation or parole, will sometimes make admissions that they might not otherwise make, because the fear that the polygraph can read their mind convinces them that their best choice is to confess.

But the polygraph can only have such utility so long as the general public believes that it can detect lies. We're at the point now that applicants for public jobs who face polygraph screening are often being specifically instructed not to research polygraphy.

it can give an avenue for questioning based on raised tension or whatever. its bot a complete farse but is not very dependable and can be decieved as well as false positives.

It's a useful interrogation technique, but only if the public believes it works.

Example in fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgrO_rAaiq0

LD tests are an unreliable technique if the subject has a clue of what LDs do measure, namely stress, and how to control those forms of stress measured by the device. After a little behavioral training, most anyone should be able to significantly reduce their stress response when lying, making the test results much harder to interpret effectively.

LDs don't catch spies. They catch novices. Aldrich Ames beat the test repeatedly. But he would, since his job was counterespionage.

They use it to ferret out untrustworthy people at government contractors. This catches some moles.

The real problem is when this hocus pocus enters the legal system and people get convicted based on examiner testimony or face the presumed guilt applied to anyone who refuses a polygraph.

There is no documented example of the polygraph ever catching a mole. On the contrary, all of the known moles who were subjected to polygraph screening beat the polygraph.

Saying that they "beat" the test gives the test too much credence. The test is a ploy to make the subject confess. The only step to beating the test, is the simple knowledge that it's a ploy in the first place.

Point well taken. But the U.S. government does consider the polygraph to be a pass/fail procedure. Applicants and employees suffer severe career harm for "failing."

Wasn't Philby caught by polygraph but argued his way out of the results? (He was, in fact, a spy all along).

No, Philby was not "caught by polygraph."

It is weird watching US tv shows when they seem to take them seriously. I could never work out if the they are a reflection of real US government practice or if the writers in Hollywood liked the pseudoscience. They are one of those weird things like fan death that doesn't seem to translate out of a particular culture.

And Hollywood as well.

Not really though. Every time it's used as a plot device to create suspense but in the end the hero or villain has been trained to beat the polygraph and get away with it. So they actually perpetuates the idea that it's fallible / can be fooled.

> So they actually perpetuates the idea that it's fallible / can be fooled.

By doing that, they also perpetuate the idea that it does work somewhat reliably and to beat it, you need special training.

Nothing changed, but I’d estimate >50% of Americans still believe in “lie detectors”. They provide easy points when you don’t have actual evidence to bring forward

Over half of Americans believe cloud computing is affected by weather patterns [1]. So ya, I'm sure at least those same people believe in lie detectors.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/people-think-stormy-weather-...

Side note: the study you cite had the question as "is cloud computing affected by weather patterns?" This finding leads one to believe that nobody actually knows what the cloud actually is, but that is a bit sensationalist: technically data centers can be down due to weather-related power outages.

A charitable reading: if you're aware that "cloud computing involves computers all over the world", but aren't aware that undersea cables carry 99.99% of international Internet traffic, then you might assume that cloud computing involves bouncing your Internet signal off a satellite at some point. Weather can interfere with satellite signals.

Same goes for cell service: a lot of people tend to believe that, while your phone just talks to a cell tower, the cell tower is talking to a satellite (rather than to wired backhaul or a microwave link.) A satellite is depicted in all those diagrams of "how cellular networking works", so I don't blame them for this at all!

Cell towers listen to GPS satellite signals to set their clocks. If GPS stops working, time division multiplexing will soon have problems.

True. Though, how soon is "soon" for TDM desync?

I think most people, if you asked them to describe how weather affects a cell tower, would describe them as working in basically the same way that Iridium handsets do: "clouds in the sky, signal goes bye." I.e., the signal would be "choppy" on the interval of milliseconds, with packet retransmissions covering it up up to some tolerance level, but failing entirely and instantaneously if the weather was bad enough.

I imagine they would think this, even though they know intuitively that cell signals are more robust than that in practice. They don't know why they know that, and they've also been taught something that conflicts with that knowledge, so depending on which order their jumble of thoughts comes to mind, it might go either way.

(Also, something I'm curious about, as a tangent: now that atomic clocks are getting cheaper, are cell towers using them to add fault-tolerance to their precise timekeeping requirements, in the way that e.g. undersea-cable head-end switches do?)

This is a good example of being too smart for a test question.

To your observation: Amazon had a major outage due to hurricane related flooding and a lightning strike back in the mid 2000s.

Colloquially, data centers also have "weather", ie, sporadic events that cause random slowness, network congestion, or scheduling problems on your cloud.

When there's bad weather in a data center, you sometimes just have to wait it out and run your jobs another day.

And... clouds: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/facebook_cloud_vers...

Um.. I would answer yes to that. Azure was out due to lightning for an entire day when I finally fully gave up on the disaster they call their cloud.

The US department of defense still uses the polygraph as an integral part of security clearance screening.

I am also dismayed, but not surprised.

> I was surprised - and dismayed - that the polygraph was still being used

Keep in mind that it was being used here by Ford, not by the FBI or Congress. I think the people who mattered are well aware they don't really work, but is also aware of their potent PR value (thanks to years of bad Hollywood science and cliches police procedurals).

I suspected something fishy was up with that the moment Ford mentioned she'd taken a polygraph. Even if it's not commonly understood by the general population (and I'm fairly sure it is) Ford is a psychologist and the hearing was full of lawyers - I'd expect that milieu to be even more informed on the shortcomings of lie detectors than the general population.

Nothing has changed, I don't think laymen ever "commonly understood" the polygraph was fallible.

Especially since they are required for some government jobs.

What's shocking to me is that in investigations involving the use of polygraph someone(higher officials) were keen on getting desired results out of it, in hope to wrap up investigation the way they want.

Why are you shocked? Haven't you read the Mark Twain quote suggesting that statics is used in the same way. This naive reaction is boosting the credibility of the polygraph. I hope the anti-polygraph book isn't full of same reasoning.

And it was being used as "evidence" by the side with the much shakier stories.