Not a “lie detector” at all

Get a little truth with a little cheat.

I want to immediately apologize to those who thought it was an article about creating a lie detector at home. This is a story about how truth can be achieved with a little deception.

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 an unequivocal answer to the question “why is it so difficult to speak 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 life has come across or at least heard of a person who lies constantly and for no apparent reason.
')

If you are lucky to avoid such people, then I will try to outline a bit the circle of the problem:

• My grandfather lost his legs when he bombed Hitler's bunker in Vietnam (his grandfather's detachment was transferred there in 1943) and he took “legs in arms” swam across the Pacific Ocean, and successfully seized his legs in a German clinic in the 90s.
• I walked down the street, I was attacked by 14 people, but I had sausages with me and I watched a lot of films about martial arts in my childhood and therefore I knew how to “scatter them all” with the help of my soybean (albeit with the smell of meat) nunchak .
• When I was 5 years old, I was lost in the woods, but with the help of squirrel, fork and stone, I collected a walkie-talkie, called rescuers and a policeman, three and a half meters tall, flew me to the helicopter (he was shy about his height, so his height was not recorded in the newspapers ).

Of course, I could not do without exaggeration, but as the assertions about how he could multiply 25-digit numbers in his mind as a child, but then he forgot how. In addition, all these highly intelligent statements, which were poured on us by a mountain river from a hole in the upper part of his body, after a while even stopped cheering. Everything was funny, until the phrase “The war in Vietnam was after World War II and your grandfather’s legs could not be sewn after 50 years of swimming in salty water” we received the answer from the series: “Oh, well, maybe I am a little confused.” But at one moment, something got stuck and we began to receive answers from another plan: “you don’t know, don’t argue” or “well, so this was also a secret, and therefore did not fall into history”. I guess that all my narrative could give rise to many 12-15 years old people in my head, who simply do not know what to stand out in life and therefore his grandmother, Gagarin, because of the collapse of the temporal continuum, but I would not begin the story with this, 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 sensitive readers - he is not sick and not a clinical idiot, he just loves to lie, has a rich imagination and poor knowledge of simple things.

So, we have a person who:

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

Looking ahead, I will 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 of the times when you know for sure that he is deceiving you, you ask if he took a cookie. After another deception, you ask him to perform some kind of action (this action will later be associated with disclosure), for example, to stretch his arms in front of him, stick out his tongue, etc. When a child performs this action, you are fully confident that he is lying. Further, as usual, the punishment “for deception” follows. Depending on the person's susceptibility, after several iterations, he builds in his head the pattern “action - result”, or in other words, gets a strong conviction that this action (hands in front of him or tongue hanging out) “passed” him. After a while, he himself will fill in the inconsistencies and inaccuracies of the methodology for determining the truth by language, conjecture and superstition. So, we have a child who believes that his deception is easy to determine if he shows language. What does this give? - you ask. And it gives it that the next time when you will not have knowledge of whether he did it or not, you just need to ask him to stick out his tongue and with high probability it can be argued that he will either refuse to do so in order not to give himself away , or himself confesses to avoid punishment.

Of course, an adult is not a child and convincing him that by language you determine whether he is telling the truth most likely will not succeed, therefore we will use a more complex pattern - the lie detector will not be fooled ...

So, a meeting with friends was scheduled and it was time to bring the plan to life.

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

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


The phone was connected via bluetooth to the PDA and played the role of a remote control, translating the lie detector's readings into the state of “Telling the truth”, “Unable to determine” or “Lies” by pressing buttons 2, 5 and 8, respectively. A garland of “sensors” was connected to the charging port of the PDA, which didn’t do anything, just made it look like “oh, yes, I’m a smart device, not fucking doggy. By the way, for the same purpose, the polygraph was launched for quite a long time, pretending that it calibrates and adjusts something very hard:

For those who will be disturbed by the question of what this nonsense is and what generally happened on the screen, let me remind you that the point is not what happened on the screen and I still don’t know what “amplitude absorption” is. The main thing was to create the appearance of something very clever going on.

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

The evening was more than interesting: to watch how, in an adult, the smile of disbelief changes to the fear of an omniscient device. It was probably the first night of all the time when he had the opportunity to speak the truth.

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