LieBabyCryBaby wrote on Nov 28^th, 2006 at 12:02am:


During the first four years after the FBI falsely branded me a liar, I did indeed simply move on with my life. It was only after finding out that what happened to me is also happening to many others that I felt compelled to speak publicly on polygraph matters. I have no regrets about the time I've spent telling others the truth about lie detectors. It has already given me much greater satisfaction than a lifetime spent administering these pseudoscientific tests ever could.

Holy sheeeet, Batman! Why don't we all just talk at once? I occasionally read this forum, and less frequently contributed to it than I have for the past couple of weeks, but now I see that I am capable of stirring the anti-polygraph pot very well indeed with my posts. But I can't possibly respond to everything all of you have written. So much of what you have written would require me to simply rehash previous posts, which in turn would lead to other responses that would require me to rehash previous posts, ad nauseum. If I choose a particular question or point, I will be accused of avoiding another or not having an answer, since on this forum polygraph examiners are apparently expected to field every question posed and every idea raised. In this way, we rare polygraph examiners on this website can hardly get a word in edgewise without being bombarded by all of the anti- folks in an apparent effort simply to overwelm us into silence and fill cyberspace with so much anti- cyberbabble that the casual, openminded reader can't help but be swayed by the sheer weight of anti- responses. Rather than take the time to reply to everything and thereby let this website be my life as it is George's, I will simply take the responses in order (assuming they don't require me to simply rehash my earlier posts), and I'll start with this one, since it is the most interesting one:

meangino wrote on Nov 28^th, 2006 at 12:24am:


Hmmm. If God created the imperfect world, does that excuse man for his mistakes . . . 

Yes, it does. God created imperfection, including the imperfect man, so even God should not expect perfection from His/Her imperfect creations. That's an easy one.

As for women being the following:

Surgeons=yes.

Airline Pilots=yes.

Military fighter pilots=yes, unless it's YOUR mom, sister, daughter or wife.

Beautician=yes, although women are inferior in this department to gay men.  

Military Police=No, if it includes any situation where she is not backed up by stronger men.

Congress=yes.

See, LBCB is not that sexist after all.  

Digithead,

If you are going to address me, at least get the acronym right.

It isn't your turn yet. Tell you what, though . . . If Dr. Richardson, the only experienced "expert" on this website of whom I am aware, will answer the question I posed for him at least two weeks ago, I will answer yours, even if it means rehashing things I and other polygraph examiners have posted regarding false positives, false negatives, etc. You see, with all the anti- people on this website, you each have the luxury of batting me fly balls all at the same time, while I can only catch one at a time. Here's the question again for Dr. R:

As a polygrapher, with all of your experience, did you ever catch an examinee using countermeasures, and if so, how did you know prior to any admission by the examinee?

Oh, and as a new "Senior User," thanks for the kudos. I never aspired to them, but I'll take my bow and hear my applause while I can.  

day2day wrote on Nov 28^th, 2006 at 2:01am:


day2day,

If that happened to me, I would indeed be upset. But just because it happened to you, or even happened to a few people on this website doesn't mean it happens a lot. People bring up the FBI's polygraph failure rate. Well, one thing FBI does is consider anything other than actually passing the exam a failure. That means that to pass, you gotta pass, not just come close. I don't agree with this way of doing exams, and I certainly don't agree with making the polygraph the deciding factor in hiring a person. It's supposed to be a useful screening tool, and any agency that uses it as the most important part of the screening process is lying to itself. If it isn't 100% accurate--and I maintain that it is around 90%--then it isn't a perfect process that you should always hang your hat on.

Now, if what you describe actually happened to you, you have a right to be pissed off. But you can either go on with your life and say, "Those are the unfair breaks," or you can devote years and years of your life as George does to talking about a machine and a process and an event in your life that are better off left behind.

Digithead,

I'm not ignoring you, but just trying to figure out your math. You've got 110% in your first paragraph. Where you get the 1% are lying, I don't know. And you fail to take into account the inconclusives that would be in that 1000 people you are screening. I'm too tired first thing on Monday morning to decipher exactly what you mean, but I'll give it a shot in the near future.   ???

Digithead,

I am beginning to see why you chose the name "digithead." Biostatistics and Bayes Theorem are interesting, and it sounds quite impressive the way you explain it. I certainly wouldn't want to study either one in college unless I had insomnia. Simply dealing with a cost/benefit analysis might better explain the way agencies look at polygraph testing, don't you think? Screening processes are just that--they screen. They take a large number of potential employees and narrow it down to a smaller number. The polygraph is widely accepted by law enforcement agencies as a good screening tool, and we could speculate on many reasons for this. But the bottom line is that when agencies view a screening process--any screening process--as 90% accurate, that's good enough for them. As for the other 10% of potential employees, any true false positives or false negatives are the cost, while the 90% are the benefit. It doesn't matter how many among that 10% are false positives or how many are false negatives in screening exams. If they feel they are right 90% of the time, that's considered damn good.  They might miss something in the background investigation too, but that would be another cost vs. the greater benefit of being 90% sure.

If you were one of the 10% cost, and you didn't deserve to be, that's still an acceptable loss to the agencies when, say, 100 applicants don't get the job for every one who does. Biostatistics aside, it's simply a matter of effective screening.  If you're the agency doing the hiring, it simply ensures that 90% of the people they do hire are the kind of employees they want.

Digithead,

I simply don't follow your numbers. Sorry. If a process is accurate 90% of the time, that doesn't equate to being correct only 1 out of 12 times. Perhaps you have a theorem that accounts for this. If not, I'm sure you will at least make it sound impressive.

Here's an interesting article about forensic "science."

http://men.msn.com/articlepm.aspx?cp-documentid=808224&GT1=8883

Most people don't realize it, but many of the forensic tools used in police work aren't as accurate as shows like "CSI" would have us believe.  There aren't very many of them that you could stake a case on and be 100% sure of making the right call. As a district attorney is quoted in the article, "Hair analysis, fiber analysis, bite marks--you don't want to base too much of a case on those. Some prosecutors succumb to the temptation to rest their case on a fiber or a hair. But a good case is made up of a bunch of little things."  Even fingerprints are said to be inaccurate a significant percentage of the time.

But would we throw out these methods that are not 100% accurate, and use eyewitness testimony alone?--Which, by the way is also nowhere near 100% accurate.

I will agree with any "anti-" person on this forum that polygraph charts alone should not determine guilt or whether a person should be hired for a job. But knowing from experience that the polygraph is usually right, I would also argue, as many agencies do, that we should keep it as a useful tool, despite the fact that it is not 100% accurate. Remember, those of you who claim to be "false positives": In law enforcement you use the best tools you have until something better comes along. If you pass the screening process and get the law enforcement job you want, you will in fact be using many of those same tools that are not 100% accurate, thereby creating your own "false positive" victims while you're right most of the time, not all of the time. Ironic, then, that many of you who want those law enforcement jobs are sitting here arguing against an imperfect law enforcement tool that is widely accepted, by many, many people and agencies, as one of those good tools.

Digithead,

You can be condescending and spout all the complicated math that you want, but it makes no difference. It's all very basic, not complicated. If we test 100 people, and we are correct 90% of the time, we can be wrong 10% of the time and it doesn't matter. From the viewpoint of the powers that be in most agencies, a screening process that gets it right 90% of the time, or even 80% of the time, does what it is supposed to do--it screens. 

So, let's assume that out of that 100 people we get 90 right and 10 wrong. Of course any agency is going to hope that all of those 10 wrong are false positives, not false negatives. Why? Because that is simply 10 people who don't get the job. But if 10 false negatives get the job, then an agency has 10 out of 100 people on the job who got through the process despite having various relevant issues to hide--the issues the agency cares about most. Screening out 10 false positives is simply the cost of doing business, you see. What they don't want are criminals working for them. Where those 10 false positives came from, there are plenty of other qualified candidates to choose from. If you want to raise those 10 false positives to 20, then it's not as attractive, but still an agency will have 80% of its employees who are the type of employees the agency wants.

Now, of course we want to look for the most accurate screening methods we can find. But looking and finding are two different things. While we are looking, we use what we have. Before DNA, we used what we had, despite whatever inaccuracies, simply because we needed to use something, right? And I still don't think law enforcement agencies are ready to give up on fingerprinting or ballistics or eyewitness accounts, for example, simply because they aren't 100% accurate.  Neither are they willing to give up on the polygraph when it is one of those useful tools and the best thing currently available.

Finally, one million people doing the wrong thing doesn't make it right. But when those one million people are doing a very tough job, they use the best tools they have, and they'll keep using them until someone invents something better. Got any inventions in mind, Digithead?