(no subject)

[supergee]

The inventor of the polygraph later dreamed up Wonder Woman. Really. I have often imagined him chortling like one of the villains in one of his stories: "If they believed the lie-detecting machine, they'll have no trouble believing the bullet-catching bracelets." His intellectual descendants promise us a similar device that will detect the fear in terrorists, presumably a cowardly, superstitious lot. Bruce Schneier discusses.

Comments

[laughingrat]

Ha, yes. Goes by the popular fallacy that only someone with something to hide has a reason to be scared, and therefore, anyone scared is a Bad Person. So if we figure out you're scared, we'll jail you until we figure out what bad thing you did, and then your arrest will be totally justified.

Yup. Can't see anything going wrong there.

[bcholmes]

"failed voodoo"?

[supergee]

I agree with Ishmael Reed that referring to Reagan's "voodoo economics" is unfair to voodoo, and I could see the same objection to using the term for the primitive belief that machines can detect lies.