Not a lie detector at all

Getting a little truth with a little cheating

I want to immediately apologize to those who felt that this article was about creating a lie detector at home. This is a story about how, with a little deception, you can achieve the truth.

When arguments and arguments do not work, it is necessary to use beliefs, prejudices and belief in all sorts of nonsense ...
It is difficult to give a definite answer to the question “why is it so difficult to tell the truth”. Someone is lying in the details, someone is lying to hide something more serious, and someone is lying just like that. Probably, each of us at least once in our lives came across or at least heard about a person who is lying constantly and without obvious reasons.


If you are fortunate enough to avoid such people, then I will try to outline a little the circle of the problem:

• My grandfather had his legs torn off when he bombed Hitler’s bunker in Vietnam (his grandfather’s detachment was transferred there in 1943) and he took the Pacific Ocean “feet in hands” and successfully sewn his feet in a German clinic in the 90s.
• He walked along the street, 14 people attacked me, but I had sausages with me and in my childhood I watched a lot of films about martial arts and therefore I knew how to “scatter them all” with the help of my soya (albeit with the smell of meat) nunchak .
• When I was 5 years old, I was lost in the forest, but with the help of a squirrel, a fork and a stone, I collected a walkie-talkie, called rescuers and a police officer 3 and a half meters tall flew in to save me by helicopter (he was shy of his height, so his growth was not recorded in the newspapers )

Of course, I could not do without exaggeration, but how ridiculous are the statements about how he could multiply 25-digit numbers in his mind as a child, but then he forgot how. In addition, all these highly intellectual statements, which poured out on us from a hole in the upper part of his body by a mountain river, after some time even ceased to amuse. Everything was funny until the phrase “The war in Vietnam was after the Second World War and your grandfather’s legs couldn’t be sewn after 50 years of swimming in salt water” we received the answer from the series: “Oh, well, maybe I messed up a little”. But at one point, something stuck and we began to receive answers of a different plan: “you don’t know, do not argue” or “well, it was secret and therefore did not make history.” I guess that all my narration could have spawned in the head of many people 12-15 years old, who simply does not know what to stand out in life and therefore, because of the collapse of the temporary continuum, his grandmother is Gagarin, but I would not start the story with this if everything would be so trivial. I will not clarify the details, but a person has already come of age some time ago and will try to reassure receptive readers - he is not sick and not a clinical idiot, he just loves to lie, has rich imagination and meager knowledge of simple things.

So, we have a person who:

1. He will not tell the truth himself.
2. Will not tell the truth under the pressure of facts.
3. He will tell the truth only if he realizes that he cannot lie.

Looking a little ahead, I’ll tell you about the psychological technique on which this DIY is based on a simple example:
The child constantly carries cookies from the kitchen, but does not admit it. One time when you know for sure that he is lying to you, you ask if he has taken cookies. After another deception, you ask him to perform some action (he will later associate this action with exposure), for example, stretch out his hands in front of him, stick his tongue out, etc. When a child performs this action, you state with full confidence that he is lying. Then, as usual, the punishment “for deception” follows. Depending on the susceptibility of the person, after several iterations, he builds the “action - result” template in his head, or, in other words, receives a strong conviction that it was this action that passed him (hands in front of him or tongue sticking out). After a while, he himself will fill in the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the methodology for determining the truth by language, guesses and superstition. So, we have a child who believes that his deception is easily identifiable if he shows the language. What does it give? - you ask. And it gives that next time when you will not have knowledge about whether he did it or not, you just need to ask him to stick his tongue out and with a high probability you can say that he will either refuse to do so, so as not to give himself away , or he himself confesses to avoid punishment.

Of course, an adult is not a child and it’s most likely that he will not be able to convince him that you can tell the truth whether he speaks the truth, so we’ll use a more complex template - you can’t lie the lie detector ...

So, we had a meeting with friends and it was time to put the plan into practice.

I want to make a small digression and explain that all this happened during the time when the phones were stupid, a pocket device with a large screen was also called a handheld computer, because not yet become a smart phone. At that time I was the owner of such a handheld computer with Windows Mobile and a simple push-button phone. It was these two devices that were supposed to turn my plan into life, and the plan was extremely simple:

On Windows Mobile, you had to create an application that built itself into a lie detector. I will not particularly focus on it, because the application was written in less than 6 hours and consisted of buttons for starting the test, a graphical representation of the “truthfulness of the answer” and simple messages - lying / not lying + another option “impossible to determine”, for situations when no one knew the truth:


The phone connected via bluetooth to the PDA and played the role of a remote control, translating the readings of the lie detector into the state of “Telling the truth”, “Unable to determine” or “Lying” by pressing the buttons 2, 5 and 8, respectively. A garland of “sensors” was connected to the PDA charging port, which did nothing, just created the appearance of “oh, yes, yes, I’m a smart device, not a dog’s horseradish”. By the way, for the same purpose, the polygraph started for a rather long time, pretending that it calibrates and tunes something very diligently:

For those who will be concerned about the question, what kind of nonsense and what was happening on the screen, I’ll remind you that the point is not in what was happening on the screen and I still don’t know what “amplitude absorption” is. The main thing was to create the appearance of something very smart happening.

Well, the plan itself was simple to disgrace. The phone was given to a friend and she decided when the answer to the question would be true, and when not, I, after a few glasses of beer, had to just get a PDA and say something like “Think about it: a real lie detector for a handheld computer!”.

The evening was more than interesting: to observe how an adult has a smile of distrust changes to fear of an omniscient device. This was probably the first night of the time when he had the opportunity to tell the truth.

And as always, I’ll end my story with a phrase from the series: “Invent your bikes, do things with your own hands.”