Ask Lemmy

Not to poo on the premise, but nobody would believe it reliable

Politicians would very quickly ban the thing "for our own security"

Politics would make them illegal so fast, your head would spin.

I read a book around 10 years ago that convinced me that lying is almost never justifiable even when it comes to white lies and I've pretty much not ever lied since. And I'm not talking about radical honesty - not lying means not saying things that you know to be untrue, not that I always tell everything that's on my mind.

Few observations that have came from this experiment:

• Most people lie constantly in situations that they wouldn't need to and they don't even realize it.
• The cartoon examples people think of about situations where you're forced to tell an uncomfortable truth almost never happen.
• People can't wait to brag about how good of an liar they are when the lie has been directed at a 3rd person - not realizing that gets them immediately labled as untrustworhy in my eyes.
• Not lying to others also makes it more difficult to lie to yourself and forces you to face your bullshit
• Most people absolutely hate for anyone to even suggest taking lying away from their toolkit (see this thread)

Can’t speak for anyone else, but every other word out of my mouth in the presence of these glasses would be an intentional lie.

Anarchy in the streets immediately. Imagine how many romantic, professional and social relationships would be tested right away.

A lot of broken relationships followed by relief years later, assuming near-universal adoption; if everyone were just honest, it would stop a lot of issues. Abusers, gaslighters, sociopaths, etc. would presumably hate the whole experience.

object on privacy grounds

That would be the reasonable thing to do.

I am trying to tag along with the thought experiment, but I can only imagine it being yet another tech bro scam. Elon Musk will sell Grok lie detector glasses that just fucking guesses, but the press will just keep copy-pasting deceitful press releases until half the people I meet believe the glasses do detect lies.

Many will then start using them in private resulting in both extreme frustration when they hallucinate lies, and unprecedented fashtech surveillance.

People would very, very quickly start to rationalize why the detection couldn't possibly be right. Look at how many scientifically or historically proven things people already are willing to disregard because it conflicts with their worldview or beliefs!

So they detect "willful" deception? People would just fall back on the "...well, I didn't know" / "didn't think XYZ counted" / "didn't consider ABC" as their excuses. Or if it can be shown that 0.00-near-infinite-zeros-01% of the population has some quirk which makes them detect wrongly, suddenly there'd be most of the population claiming that.

Might be a problem with narcissists who believe their own lies?

If I look in a mirror, will they detect when I'm lying to myself? Take my money.

• Without lies any civilization would collapse in a matter of minutes: faced with what all of us really think, most people would kill one another (or commit suicide) even faster than that, as all the wishful-thinking and illusions so many of us rely upon would instantly vanish.
• People would try to get rid of that tech (and in the process some would decide to do some nasty things to their creators/advocates) trying to save themselves from that very short lived hell this tech created. And they would fail.

Lawyers would be fucked.

It would destroy civilization instantly, since it relies on lies all the way down.

they somehow detect willful deception, like people expect polygraphs to do, but with high accuracy

This technology is a fantasy. It relies on the false assumption that their are detectable, reliable, and measurable physiological differences between bodies that are lying and bodies that are telling the truth.

Polygraphs aren't unreliable because the technology isn't ready. They're unreliable because the idea that you can physically measure a concept (lying) is logical fallacy. (reification).