I'm sorry, but it is not the consequence of my argument. The degree of the disagreement is important. You are ignoring this, but I stated it before - there is a difference in the degree of disagreement in the scientific community regarding polygraphs and ID. The degree of disagreement regarding polygraphs is enough to state that it there is not a concensus.
Okie doke.
Please specify the degree of disagreement it takes.
What parts do I have wrong? Be specific, please.
It isn't a question of you being wrong or not.
Have you been qualified by Randi to perform preliminary tests?
No? Then stop lecturing those who have on how to go about it.
So what? The basis of the claim is irrelevant for the challenge, as is the ability claimed. If a psychic claims that he can read the mind of the person with the card, or can speak to dead people, or gets inverse tachyon pulses through his main deflector array, it matters not. The challenge is based on doing it.
You misunderstand. It isn't about what qualifies for the challenge, but where the psychic got her notion that she could talk to dead people from.
That comes from real life, and not a lab test.
Right?
Again, so what? If that is true, then the test would fail. The guesses would approximate random chance. But the NAS analyzed many different tests that show performance well above random chance.
It would approximate random chance if you tested it in a situation where people would actually be intimidated by the polygraph. But you don't get that in lab tests, because there's no real intimidation.
No it doesn't. obviously, some controls or methods of analysis have been developed to overcome at least some of these challenges in labratory conditions.
How can you design a lab test that invokes the same fear reactions as a real life test would?
Now you are just being silly. A meta analysis that shows performance of multiple tests performing well above what is expected by chance is the result of... chance?
If it were pseudoscience, the chance factor would be minimized in the meta analaysis.
No, I'm not being silly. Your claim that polygraphs don't perform at all, if it were pseudoscience, is simply false. They work - but because they extract confessions because they scare the bejeebus out of people.
Much of the contention here seems to be around whether a polygraph can detect lies or not.
Setting that question aside for the moment, how would people respond to the following affirmation:
When tested on a large sample population, the process of polygraph interrogation in specific incident investigation can detect deception at a rate better than chance alone.
or to put it another way:
polygraphs do NOT detect lies, but that the polygraph process itself may perform better than chance in determining deception
CFLarsen, would you agree with the above affirmation?
I suspect that much of the arguing here is over whether the device can detect deception (it can't, and I agree that would be substantial woo!) as opposed to whether the process can determine deception better than chance alone.
We can't get around the scare factor, when we test polygraphs. How do we get that in a lab?
Now that's just silly. Here's an analogy:
Various cancers are self-screened based on the assumption that you can detect cancer from the presence of anomalous lumps within the tissue. We know that cancer isn't the only reason that anomalous lumps would exist.
This does NOT mean that self-examination is useless as a method of screening for cancer, just that it is not perfect.
The question for polygraphy is not whether people always express the physical reactions when lying...it's whether people usually express these reactions.
We find out whether lumps are cancers or not, because we can do biopsies to check. What we can't use polygraphs for, is to detect lies, unless we know what are lies and what are not.
Which, once again, emphasizes the fact that polygraphs are implements of intimidation. Nothing else.
