24 was notorious for this, it practically celebrated it. It's so celebrated in film and TV that it even has tropes, like with the classic 'opening the bag of surgical instruments' kind of scene, if not the pure brutality of punching an answer out of someone strapped to a chair. Never mind the pure torture porn films like Saw and Hostel.
Torture should be depicted for the pure atrocity that it is, not as an entertaining plot piece to imagine doing nasty things to a Russian/Middle eastern person.
Recently, cops have been getting in trouble for shooting suspects as they run "away" from the police.
Interestingly, cops shooting at fleeing suspects is very common in TV shows and movies, but generally considered unacceptable in real life.
I've sometimes wondered if the cops who grew up watching these scenes over and over again as children, might be inadvertently bringing that same behavior into their real life jobs.
Of course the challenge of proving this, is well stated in this quote:
"Does TV viewing really contribute to all those reactions? ...At the heart of the debate is the difficulty of proving that one thing causes another...Similarly, it has been difficult to prove that the violence shown on television causes crime and antisocial behavior...A Canadian psychologist wrote: “The scientific evidence simply does not show that watching violence either produces violence in people or desensitizes them to it.” However, the American Psychological Association Committee on Media and Society said: “There is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive behavior.”"
However, among past social circles of mine, I can definitely say TV helped normalize behaviors that at one time weren't as common.
For example, I saw gangster rap, and all of the forms of entertainment that accompanied it's rise in the 90's, dramatically normalize arrogant and aggressive behavior among my peers in suburbia.
So to me, it's logical that TV and movies are one part of the cultural fabric that can indoctrinate new behaviors in the real world. Some of them really unfortunate.
Recently, cops have been getting in trouble for shooting suspects as they run "away" from the police.
I don't see this as commonplace at all. Generally, deadly force is authorized only in response to an imminent threat to oneself or others. Shooting someone fleeing would be justifiable only if that person was considered likely to harm others during that flight.
TV/film was always ludicrously loose on use of deadly force by police. Even Bert the cop shot at an unarmed, fleeing George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life"!
Rather than just saying it does or doesn't cause it, I think we should also discuss how it may cause it. Because I think the sole extent of the influence is that it suggests the idea of doing it. And if someone explicitly brings it up and tells people not to do it, then that will be sufficient to make people not act on the idea.
In other words, I think there might be a causality chain, but one that can be easily broken.
Just search for the Movie Overgames on YouTube. It shows how the psychology was used in gameshows of the 50ies to reeducate Germans. TV was thought of as means to heal.
I think series like 24 were no accident. They pushed the limit farther. Today even kid movies like Pets is more than slapstick comedy. Even there you see torture as valid means.
People in other countries see the same amount of violence in TV or videos games yet they have much less violence rates. I remember me thinking "that kind of thing only happens in the US" when watching violence (and lawsuits) in TV. I wonder if it's the proliferation of American entertainment that forms part of these behaviors.
It is more likely tied to the lower socioeconomic status of those two groups due to historical and current bias and oppression. Any 'violent culture' you might see is a product of the larger society these groups live in and not something inherent to the groups.
I've always been interested in this paper, which suggests that the idea of flashbacks as a symptom of PTSD coincides may be culturally-influenced and coincide with developments in cinema.
But regarding torture, in the 70's Christian/Roman era themed movie were commonly shown on TV. As a child I concluded that every man eventually gets tortured. While we were watching a particularly brutal scene I asked my dad if he was ever tortured and didn't believe him when he said "no". But if TV weren't enough, we had a crucifix in every room and I found the normalization and ubiquity of depictions of torture depressing and confusing, leaving me convinced I was born on the wrong planet.
The reason the crucifix is the symbol of Christianity is related to what you're talking about, but the idea is that the normalization is to remind us we are not to fear torture. In particular, that we can be like Jesus and sell people out, even if under torture or the threat of torture, because we really do have free will. After all, Jesus could have cooperated with his denouncers and sold out the apostles, but instead he kept his silence and resolve and was tortured to death on the cross.
Supposedly the patron saint of the tortured is Epipodius (just looked it up), but in my faith I actually believe there is no patron saint of the tortured. If you're tortured that's a cut above every other predicament and the only saint for you is the patron saint of all patron saints, Jesus, because he was the original Christian to get tortured for his faith.
Gladwell covered a case study in his book “Blink” that was interesting. As you will guess, he’s exploring what goes into split second decisions like those
Showing that torture is an effective way for good guys to obtain something is particularly bad. However, I am not against the use of torture in films like Saw.
Saw is a horror movie. Horror movies are a way to experience scary things without putting you in actual danger. And they are not going to achieve that by just showing kittens playing, getting you to be scared/horrified/disgusted/... when you know you are perfectly safe and that the story is fiction is hard enough. So they use an arsenal of techniques, from jump scares to phobias and gruesome deaths. And torture is great for this. We can imagine what it feels like, we get to see the blood and gore, we know it something that happens in the real world,... Well made, torture scenes are very effective at creating tension when it is called for.
And I don't think we should not use them just because torture is atrocious in real life. When we go see a horror movie or thriller, we know the game, we don't want it to go easy on us. Deep inside, we know we are safe, that's what allows us to have fun playing with our limits.
Is it healthy? I think so, most kids love getting scared at some point, and they don't become psychopaths as a result. And horror stories, even the most tasteless ones definitely don't glorify what they are showing.
Films like Saw and The Human Centipede are probably just adrenaline rushes and quick thrills. I'm not keen on them because I tend to empathise too much with characters and, to be honest, I don't want to put myself in the shoes of someone facing their final moments with a reverse bear trap stuck to their face. It's generally why I'm not overly keen on violence in movies because I start to over-think or over-feel it, and those situations are so unrealistic that of course I can't comprehend it. I suppose that in itself is a form of cosmic horror but it's purely self inflicted, it's not what the movie is selling. Saw isn't a Lovecraft film.
I wouldn't stop anyone else from watching them, and those movies aren't shit or trashy either (like some commenter has said). But I know my reasons for not enjoying them, and preferring horror that is more subtle, psychological, and rooted in realistic trauma that I've experienced myself.
Torture is out of the picture because it's too often depicted as something the torturer can't wait to do, they're just held back by a system and they want to go rogue. You know, the trope of the torturer unfolding a cloth or a leather pouch to joyously reveal a bunch of surgical instruments. Or punching a guy in the face so hard it knocks their chair over; which in real life would probably put them in a coma.
You could say the same thing about most violence in movies though. Tonnes of popular action movies have the main character casually shooting dozens of people, and portray it in a positive light (ex. John Wick). I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing either, it is reasonable to have violence and torture as a plot point in a movie, and portraying that violence accurately would just be upsetting to the audience.
That's only because you chose the lessons that support whatever you wanted to prove.
Alternatively, John Wick, and almost every other action movie, show us that violence - and killing people - is an effective and morally acceprable way of solving problems. The distinction between violence and torture depictions is not as obvious as you want it to be.
> Alternatively, John Wick, and almost every other action movie, show us that violence - and killing people - is an effective and morally acceprable way of solving problems.
I don't think that's accurate. More like, John Wick implies that violence and murder of those above the law is an effective and morally acceptable way to solve the injustice they perpetrate. That's a much more reasonable position that will have plenty of people on both sides.
And here I thought the lesson was that in a world filled with assassins to the point of necessitating some code of conduct, where there is a man spoken of around the world as the Bogeyman, it is in particular a terrible idea to, after his retirement and the death of his lover, steal his car, kill his dog, and leave him for dead.
Spoiler warning:
I mean, yeah, there is some more food for thought in there :
-The violence endemic to the conflict between man and the system in which he operates: (Wick and the Continental)
-The face of violence embodied by the struggle between personal/professional loyalty: Wick, and the Manager of the Continental.
-The violent fruits of man's will to free himself of the constraints of a system designed specifically to constrain him: Wick's breaking of the code.
-The tendency of violence to beget and amplify itself in the absence of some braking force.
-That violence exists as a universal tool in the toolset of interpersonal conflict, and a view of the world if it were shaped around an organized deployment thereof outside of our current set of institutions that we entrust with controlling the application of violence.
C'mon though, let's not pretend the movie justifies anything. It's Art. It isn't there to be blamed as a causative factor, it's there to be appreciated and moved by. To make you think, feel, and give you a new perspective. If John Wick can be credibly pointed to as a causative factor of escalating violence, then clearly Andy Warhol caused obesity and consumerism with his soup can, Dali causes people to be tardy, Clive Cussler is a leading cause of totally badass and inexplicably effective oceanographer cum international crisis resolvers, H.G. Wells caused the atomic bomb, Orson Scott Card already laid out how we'll handle first contact, and Oscar Wilde created the surveillance hellscape in which we live.
We may be moved by what we see, but in the end it is we ourselves that are the causative factors. We react, we integrate, we sculpt spots for each other to settle into through what we knowingly and unknowingly do.
Does Art shape culture? Or culture shape Art? Are the Artists warning us of what is to come, or are they tangifying the steps in the direction society is already progressing towards? We can't say for certain, but in the absence of an authoritative answer, I'd wager there us a dynamic equilibrium at work that is starting to be compensated for, depending on where individual decisions of sentiment end up pointing.
Since we are talking about 24, in season 6 Morris O'Brian gives the bad guys a working detonator for the nuclear bomb that goes off after getting tortured.
Good counterpoint. I mostly know films. And I was thinking in particular about "Sin City". And some Seagal film involving his toes and a hammer. Or maybe it was another action hero.
This point gets brought up every time someone brings up the prevalence of torture & rape in media. I submit that it just derails discussion and never goes anywhere interesting. There is a difference between regular action movie style violence (shooting, explosions, etc.) and rape/torture. If you want to socrates that distinction go ahead, but it is common sense that these are different things.
Yes, remember mortal kombat? 5fps gore created the ESRB. Up until then it was a-ok to shoot bad guys (Hogan’s alley) or stomp on overgrown turtles (Super Mario)
I think this is missing the point. Shooting people works at what it sets out to do. Torture doesn't. Despite this, they're both portrayed as effective in getting their intended outcomes.
The problem isn't portraying torture, but portraying it as something that always gets actionable, accurate information.
Yeah but the moral argument for torture boils down entirely to whether or not it works, aside from a few sadists who think of it as revenge or a deterrent.
The point isn't that there may be an argument that it's moral even if it's ineffective, but rather that, even were it effective there's no moral argument to be made for it.
This is clearly not true. If it were an effective means of getting accurate information, then there would be moral arguments for using it in some situations, to prevent even worse events (An imminent nuclear attack? Biological weapons attack? Whatever horrific scenarios you care to imagine) from coming to pass.
I don't believe in these mathematical greater evil arguments. I assume you would not kill a baby even if it was guaranteed to prevent a plane crash killing a hundred people.
One should not make relativistic moral calculations with fundamentally unacceptable acts.
That's exactly right. In this light, what one should and shouldn't according to a single person (what your last post was about) doesn't have any meaning when discussing what many individuals could value: that's on a higher meta level.
It becomes at best a statement of opinion, and at worst it can be taken as dismissive of the values of others.
> Yes, I think most of us are dismissive of some values of some others and that's OK.
I don't believe this is a very useful property of a conversation which is about trying to understand how the world squares with opinions that people can hold.
Misrepresenting the reality of violence is indefensible. Maybe it's OK to misrepresent love, sport or politics. But violence is serious. There is a qualitative difference between highly stylized gun fu (like John Wick), in which pain is hardly ever in the picture, and any portrayal of torture.
The Saw films are called "torture porn". There is no good thing about them. They are horrible movies and show just how low people will go to watch trash.
Tony Stark is a stone cold murderer sociopath, he kills a bunch of terrorists and then seconds after almost killing someone in a friendly fire incident, laughs about it with his buddy.
> People can encourage filmmakers being responsible while not encouraging turning the government on them.
Responsible art? Give me a break. Leave art alone. Overly sensitive people have already ruined so much of internet already. I'd hate to see art destroyed as well. If you don't like the art, then don't consume it. Simple as that.
> criticism is a necessary part of the equation that allows free speech to work.
There is a difference between critiquing an art and trying to shame artists from abandoning their art.
Are you going to encourage libraries to be "responsible" and remove huckleberry finn or mein kampf? What I really worry about are the sneaky backhanded method of pushing censorship that I see online now. They are worse than the "won't you think of the children" types.
The idea that these plot points are beyond criticism or commentary gets us formulaic plots, one dimensional characters and generally the same story again and again and again.
There is no big conspiracy in entertainment to make torture acceptable. It is primary dumb plot point that is easy to plug in to get cheap thrill. Just like dumb one dimensional characters characterized by one personality trait are not result of some kind of psychological conspiracy.
Acting like this stuff is inappropriate to comment upon is what allows those to stay. Criticizing and commenting on bad cgi and bad acting raised quality of those too.
I don’t wanna devolve into talking about pop culture but...this really isn’t true. Sure, Bauer tortured a bunch of people over the course of the series but it had a success rate of 50% or less. In fact, the very first depiction of torture in the show didn’t work (the one against Ted Koppel in season one).
You make a good point, but how would you implement this? Would you place artistic limits on directors? Why do you think that torture scenes are so popular in film and TV - is this an issue with filmmakers trying to satisfy a bloodthirsty audience?
I watch hardly any horror movies, and yet the continue to proliferate. Why?
Really, this idea of shifting personal behavior and hoping the market/economy as a whole will follow is advanced for some many problems, and in general it is a dismal failure. Why would you even expect it to work? Theaters might stop booking movies that are unpopular, but there is zero social penalty for going to see a movie; and in any case, most movies are watched at home, as is porn.
Where is the evidence for this working? Over what timescale? How is it to be measured, especially when streaming video viewership is far less transparent than even old-fashioned box office and movie rental receipts? It's little more than a statement of religious faith in the market, and doesn't even engage with the possibility that vicious as well as virtuous cycles exist and can be manipulated.
I'm certainly not up for censorship. A lot of it just comes across as American power projection (always the good guy American torturing the bad foreigner doing evil things), which I guess is just a fact of life unless you avoid Hollywood and stick to international/art house cinema. Aside from glorifying war and torture, it's such a low-effort cliche and it fails at evoking disgust when it's shrouded in a plot that absolves the good guys of all wrong doing. You know, the end justifies the means, and a side-effect is that now people think torture is good so long as you think the victim is bad.
Imagine how many people in Guantanamo have been subjected to over a decade of this treatment under the utterly delusional belief that they must have some information to offer and cannot, under any circumstance, be innocent, so therefore they deserve it.
As a counter-example, Antichrist features some scenes that could be seen as torture if the story was reframed. Same with Nymphomania. While that kind of shock value is par for the course for Lars von Trier, it doesn't necessarily celebrate it. I'm sure plenty wanted to ban or censor that; I just wanted to see something genuinely disturbing.
Not really a solution, because the people who need this advice the most are also very likely to be the ones to not follow it, as they like those movies.
I've taken to calling this phenomenon (for a lack of a better word) "Popaganda" -- beliefs that are spread and mutually reinforced throughout popular media and the general population. If something seems believable, it makes its way into popular media and is therefore made more believable in an endless feedback loop, regardless of how inaccurate it is and regardless of how damaging it is for society to believe such a falsehood. The reason for singling these concepts out, and lumping it together with something as insidious as propaganda is that, similar to propaganda, once someone believes one of these concepts and sees it repeated around them so many times, it is almost impossible to convince them otherwise.
Some examples, both specific and general:
* Smart people always immediately know solutions to problems and are 100% confident about these solutions
* If someone's heart stops beating, just use a defibrillator
* Hacking is an active activity
* Modern medicine is "white box" -- just scan your body, see the problem and get meds that fix it
* "Someone" (a government, a company, an evil mastermind etc.) is always in control of any given situation involving a large number of people, regardless of how chaotic the situation is and how many stakeholders are involved
Interesting. The prevalence in even lighter films makes me think maybe the phenomenon is driven more by its utility as a plot device, or something along those lines.
For example (just taking a wild guess), if we assume:
- There is an antagonist (individual or organization)
- The characters need to stop whatever the antagonist's plan is, but lack some necessary information
- The antagonist sends some type of minion to stop them from stopping the plan
Defining "torture" as broadly as it seems to be defined here, it would be a very natural plot mechanism for enabling the main characters to accomplish their goal in this scenario. And this scenario, really, is incredibly common. Almost more common in children's movies compared to other movies, because of its simplicity.
Also, it seems even more appealing in this scenario if we assume the characters aren't going to kill anybody (again, for children's movies). If there's a big fight or chase which ends with the protagonists having captured the minion, what do they do with him/her? They can't just let them go, that would be anticlimactic. They can't kill them. Squeezing information out of them before letting them go is satisfying and purposeful and progresses the plot, while still being merciful and family-friendly.
The medium of film in general is just much more prone to using violence as a plot device - it’s a cheap & easy way to create conflict. Whereas books can describe inner emotional state more readily and thus cheap conflict can be emotional.
Skilled directors and writers in movies can of course create conflict in all sorts of ways but all the hacks out there are just going to reach for the gun.
And in my opinion, it's had a noticeable effect on public opinion.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt to me like everyone knew that torture was wrong before the first series of 24 came out, and then a few years later, everyone thought it was often the right thing to do.
24 premiered on November 6, 2001, 56 days after the 9/11 attacks. My un-informed opinion is torture got a whole lot more popular because of that than the show
I remember it the other way around - I first heard about 24 from neo-cons saying the next 9/11 would never have happened if the government had more Jack Bauers willing to "do what needed to be done." Torture was already popular with the administration, at least.
Americans, meanwhile, were angry and many just wanted Muslims to suffer, and their government was telling them that torture (sorry, "enhanced interrogation") was not only just, but necessary and effective, and that opposing it was not only cowardice but borderline treason, and would lead to the next 9/11.
This would be fine and dandy and all part of an exciting narrative if not for the fact that torture in the real world is incredibly unreliable. Top Google results are mostly politicized so here's Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness_of_torture_for_i...
You write that as if it is an indisputable law of nature. It's been debated in philosophy/ethics forever. Like most controversial ethical issues, it's unsettled at best.
> It really doesn’t matter how effective it is.
Many would disagree. If proven effective, you could easily argue it is moral to torture an evil-doer to save the lives of many.
Life isn't black and white. It's a lot of gray. You are free to believe what you want, but I just don't like the absolute moralizing - especially when it comes to controversial topics.
>Many would disagree. If proven effective, you could easily argue it is moral to torture an evil-doer to save the lives of many.
Neither of these things are an actual argument. Just because some people disagree it does not make a fact untrue. Just because you can argue something does not make that arguement correct.
The argument that many good lives would be saved is defeated by the fact that a society that tortures people is making a mockery of human dignity and the values that can underpin human happiness. When one person can be tortured for extreme need, soon anyone can be tortured for any reason. There are countless examples of this kind of slippage, from the terrors in France and Russia to the use of extreme surveillance by local authorities in the UK (to determine if school places should be allocated). How can anyone be happy when they might be taken and tortured at any moment? How can the preservation of people in terror be a goal to be accomplished by an intrinsically evil act.
We are defined by how we dispense mercy and compassion, that is what makes society worth preserving.
That sort of segues into my counter to Machiavelli's 'end justifies the means'. Which is what if the means are the ends? You want to live in a world where you get tortured if the cops think you aren't being helpful enough? Or maybe they do it as a matter of policy?
The problem with trolley problems (and utilitarianism in general) is that they assume a degree of foresight that rarely exists in the real world. You know there are more lives at risk on path A than path B, and you know that pressing a button will reliably allow you to choose between them.
None of this obtains in the torture case. Suppose you learn with certainty there is a bomb somewhere on Main Street, and you capture X, the evil bomber, with only 10 minutes to go. You want X to give you the exact location, because you don't have time to evacuate the whole street.
So you torture X...but what if he just gives you the wrong location? It will take you several minutes to check it out, and while you're doing so, the bomb goes off. You've failed. Even when you know for sure that the torture subject has the information you want there is delay between getting an answer and verifying it. In any ticking clock scenario the original malefactor can build in a plan for a diversion or the equivalent o a warrant canary to warn co-conspirators.
So what do you do? Send someone to check but act like you don't believe them and keep torturing X anyway? X knows it will take non-zero time to validate any answer and can structure the evil plot to take account of that. If you keep torturing X, you might just get a second decoy, plus there's now a strong argument that you're just doing it because you like it, and have picked a job which provides you with the excuse of necessity.
And ticking-clock-with-captured-terrorist scenarios are so rare in reality as to be nonexistent. Almost invariably torture is deployed either to terrorize people or to fish for information which the subject might or might not have. Generally, if prisoners won't supply the information an interrogator desires, they don't have it; and if they do have it, they're sufficiently strong-willed to withstand the torture. In a good many cases, the fact of torture motivates them to hold out, because it validates their moral opposition to a power that tortures people in the first place.
I don’t really like this example. Has there ever been a situation where things were things were so urgent that torturing somebody was the only option? I doubt it. And if torture is so useful why only apply it to foreigners and not criminals at home?
The only thing mention in the article is that torture can lead to false confessions, which are undesirable but very far from showing that torture is not effective on net. What's the best citation for ineffectiveness?
The CIA engaged in a sustained campaign of black site torture under Bush and the subsequent report found that they obtained no actionable intelligence from "enhanced interrogation".
They did get some intelligence - from conventional interrogation and debriefing of prisoners.
The problems seem to be that the person may not know the information and the information may not be easy to verify.
Wouldn't that make torture potentially effective in cases without those issues, such as torturing someone to get them to reveal a password to an encrypted device that you know they use daily?
Almost certainly. Even with the plausible deniability measures others mention, if the torturer has no scruples and is willing to sacrifice you, you will give it all up.
That this is awful does not make it untrue.
If it makes everyone feel better, the tech to simply "read" your secrets out of your brain with no torture whatsoever will likely soon exist (or already does).
That said, a lot of torture is performed not to extract information but to instill terror, etc.
Yes, and it is often effective even with those issues.
Suppose you know facts A, B, C, and D. You want to know E. You ask about all 5 facts. You can verify 4 out of 5, but you don't reveal that. After getting the 5 answers, you trust fact E if the other facts are verified. If not, torture, but don't reveal how exactly you are sure about lying, and then try again.
If you don't already know E, then how are you going to verify it? How do you even know they know it?
Given that they don't want to tell you E in the first place, how many of the hundreds of answers they'll scream at you are you going to be able to follow up on?
The point is that you verify A, B, C, and D. If they are telling you the truth about those, they are probably also truthful about E. They could only effectively lie about E if they knew that was the one thing you couldn't verify.
And if they lie about those? Which they will because your scenario starts with "sufficiently uncooperative that you are going to torture them".
What you're actually going to do is here the answer you already know, stop the pain and ask something else, and thus tell the person exactly what to say to make the pain stop - while having no actual ability to know if there answer for E is truthful or if they even know it. Eventually you'll get an answer you like, and that will be the only answer they give because again, it made the pain stop.
You missed the logic here. I'll try again, but it's the third explanation. You need to ponder this.
The items A, B, C, and D are all known. (from other sources of information) They are used as an honesty test.
To make the pain stop, the only way out is to reveal E and to correctly reveal A, B, C, and D. Lying isn't going to work, because the fact that E is special is not revealed.
It isn't reasonable to guess that E is the unknown.
If someone is sufficiently uncooperative that you've (foolishly) decided you're going to torture the information out of them, then the information is pretty important. So important they're probably already willing to die to protect it.
That's the stakes here when you're at that point: fear of death is not enough motivation, fear of not dying quickly is.
In this situation there's no reason the person isn't going to lie for an extended period of time about A, B, C and D. So why wouldn't they then lie about E? Because you think you're going to have broken them by that time? Gotten them suitably fearful of what you'll do next that they don't also just start lying about E? Are you so sure that after whatever horrors you've inflicted their psyche will be intact enough to even give a coherent answer? Keeping in mind, that sleep deprivation and extended interrogation has been shown - repeatedly - to be enough to make otherwise innocent people confess to brutal crimes they did not commit.
EDIT: People keep thinking torture is effective because if I broke your fingers with a hammer, you'd give me your car keys. What's actually happening is I'm breaking your fingers one by one with a hammer, and saying I'll stop if you tell me where your family is so I can go murder them all.
Firstly, I'm 100% against torture and agree its ineffective. But your rejection of the logic here is incorrect.
> In this situation there's no reason the person isn't going to lie for an extended period of time about A, B, C and D. So why wouldn't they then lie about E?
You seem to be thinking about this in chronological sequence, as if we ask about A then B then C then D then E. If that was the case, then yes, your logic would work. They might have lied about A for a long time, then B for a long time, then C for a long time, then D for a long time, then E for a long time and you'd never know if they were telling the truth about E.
But that's not what is being proposed. We ask about A, B, C, D, and E altogether. As in you have conversation and asked them about A, B, C, D, and E before doing any torture. If they lied about A, B, C, or D we torture them. Then we have the same conversation again, and torture them again. Eventually, they start telling the truth about say C. Why C? They are just choosing something at random to tell truth about in hopes of making the pain stop. But nothing changes, we keep torturing them because we know they are still lying about A, B, and D. Eventually they also start telling the truth about A, then E, then B, then D. Then we stop torturing them because they are being honest about everything we can verify. They can escape without divulging the information only if they keep E until last.
The key assumption here is that the person being tortured reveals the truth in a random order. It is improbable that they happen to keep the one thing we cannot verify until the end.
This is not to say that this procedure would be effective, but its not ineffective for the reason you suggest.
On the theory side, the probability of keeping E until the end is 1/5, which isn't that low.
On the practical side, this requires that the person being tortured has no idea what you can and can't verify. If, instead, they have some idea of what you can and can't verify, they'll be able to keep the hardest to verify information till the end preventing this scheme from working.
Not if they have a deniable secondary volume set up. Or only encrypted a partition (which you can't mathematically prove its actually data and not just empty space).
People have been arrested and held because they had Truecrypt installed but never actually used it.
Basically if you decrypt the device what are you looking for? What if you don't find it?
I’m always shocked at how many people will argue that torture is always ineffective. I’m 100% sure I’d cave under torture, providing a mix of everything I know and what I think they want to hear. They just need to look for falsifiable statements. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis comes up as a topic here often and is a perfect example.
It may be an immoral human rights violation, and not the best first line interrogation tactic, but I see it as undeniably effective. It seems like wishful thinking to believe otherwise.
> I’m always shocked at how many people will argue that torture is always ineffective.
It's effective at getting the victim to say whatever they think will make the torture stop. People aren't stupid though, they know the truth won't necessarily achieve that goal. Sometimes the truth will simply encourage more torture.
Falsfiable statements then require verification, presumably against a more reliable source of information. But if you have a more reliable source of information, what additional confidence did the torture provide? And if you don't have a more reliable source of info for verification, then the torture still provided no confidence in the information.
The best interrogators know that befriending your captives provides considerably better information, and it doesn't produce more enemies or escalate the conflict. Imagine if torture had been routine during the Cold War.
Verification can be as simple as decrypting a drive, identifying collaborators, revealing new crimes, new investigatory pathways (bank accounts, travel movements, etc.. These can be impractical or impossible to discover without additional information.
Befriending captives is no doubt a better first line interrogation tactic for all the reasons you state. Torture can still be effective yet not worthwhile due to negative externalities.
I’m not a proponent of using it, I just think the argument against should acknowledge why it’s still being used around the world.
> It's effective at getting the victim to say whatever they think will make the torture stop.
Having been awake during some particularly excrutiating medical procedures, my mind was not creative or clear or able to access memories in any meaningful context (being in a panic state). If I was being tortured and what they wanted to hear was the truth, I can be assured to tell it to them in broken english under the right duress. So this "be friendly" approach is typical social engineering. Ok, thats nice.
> If I was being tortured and what they wanted to hear was the truth, I can be assured to tell it to them in broken english under the right duress.
Except you also just said that you weren't able to access memories in any meaningful context, so how are certain you would or even could be truthful?
And even if you were truthful, they would then torture you more to "be sure" you were being honest, which they can never be sure of, so where does it end?
And then your information might conflict with information they obtianed elsewhere, so they torture you some more to ascertain the truth, but there's no end point at which uncertainty disappears.
Ultimately, your panic-addled brain realizes that the truth isn't actually useful in this context and grasps at any straws thus diluting the signal to noise ratio. This progression is simply inevitable. The confidence in anything the victim says is basically nil.
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
When people say it doesn't "work" they don't mean that the victims don't "cave", they mean that the information the torturer gets isn't useful because as you say the victim will tell the torturer anything they want to hear. Also in movies usually the purpose of torture is to make the victim divulge something we already know they know, like where they hid the treasure we saw them steal in an earlier scene. In real life we don't know if the victim knows anything in the first place - they may be guilty or they may be totally innocent.
I was particularly upset, after watching Zero Dark Thirty, to find out that it was nominated for various Academy Awards, given its justification of torture. Portraying torture positively is particularly more troublesome than on "24", for instance, since Zero Dark Thirty claims to be based on history and thus is more likely to affect people's perception of reality and the justifiability of torture.
What real evidence do we have that torture is ineffective?
The only claims I have read are of limited tortures (e.g., waterboarding, freezing, isolation, playing bad music, etc.) that are allowed by Western democracies sometimes.
I simply cannot believe that more intense torture techniques (say, those used by criminal elements) will not result in an individual revealing whatever he knows (or dying).
I just started watching Better Call Saul, and I was happy to see that when they tortured a character, he told them what they wanted to hear, but then others were like "You had wirecutters to him...he would have said anything".
Torture makes for a convenient plot device. It allows a way for an antagonist to help the protagonist without lessening tension or creating any sort of reconciliation.
A lot of writers are faced with “so how does the good guy get the bad guys minions to turn on him in a short amount of time?”
A common trope in movies is “working your way up the food chain” ... getting low level guys to flip on their bosses.
There aren’t many ways to do that, and the alternatives create distraction.
When you look at Hollywood plot lines, they’re often with a singular hero, who goes nuts, breaks laws to do what’s necessary. You rarely see communal action or a society standing together. There are exceptions, like Selma.
I find it curious there even are people who would consider torturing someone. I wonder what's the difference between people who would and who wouldn't. I.e. I would certainly prefer to die peacefully than to attack anybody, let alone hurt somebody just to achieve a minor goal.
Famously, in the past, in popular media, only bad guys used torture. After 9/11 and the show 24, the good guys started doing it more and more frequently. It’s an awful societal norm
I'm pretty sure this is recency bias. Remember the TV show "The pretender"? (1996-2000). It was fairly formulaic and every single episode ended up with Jarod, the protagonist, finding out the bad guy and putting him in a convoluted setup of psychological torture (usually threatening their life or their family in the same way they had killed the innocent person) until they admitted the crime.
I think this study is misleading. They are classifying a huge variety of situations as "torture".
From their paper, they describe one example in Zootopia:
Officer Hopps needs to find the drop-off location for "night howler" flowers (a poisonous flower
that has been weaponized to turn animals "feral"). She turns to an organized crime boss to extract
information from a lackey of the antagonists. The crime boss's polar bear enforcers hold the lackey
over a hole in iced-over water, threatening to throw him in (and ostensibly kill him) if he doesn't
give up the location. "Ice him," says the crime boss. The lackey quickly gives up the desired information and our heroes go on to (spoiler alert) save the day.
Cartoon animals were threatening to throw someone into the water. Is that really "torture"?
Later in the paper, they describe that they include any "threat of pain" to be torture, as long as it isn't self-defense. So a schoolyard bully saying "I'll punch you unless you give me your lunch money" is considered to be torture.
Naturally, with this sort of definition of torture, they discover that most movies contain torture.
Yea, under this definition, every time someone points a gun at someone it's torture. This sort of re-definition of terms reduces the public's trust in academics on an important topic.
“As citizens of a democracy, our suggestion here is certainly not to constrain how media depict interrogations and torture .... Rather, our aim is to draw attention to the prevalence of this trope and hope that screenwriters will exercise more caution in using torture as a plot device.”
IMO this is not different from shocking a flatlining patient; it does not work, and {may be a missed public education opportunity, may lose some credibility points}
Torture should be depicted for the pure atrocity that it is, not as an entertaining plot piece to imagine doing nasty things to a Russian/Middle eastern person.