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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   33104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Inherently useless as a means of gathering intelligence. Torture works great if all you want is to discourage people to fuck with you. Ask the Cartels.

I share your skepticism of convenient narratives, and this is a topic that is necessarily polluted by them. But the evidence just doesn't add up. If torture was so effective we wouldn't have had to purge it out of our judicial system because people kept admitting to things that weren't true.

And frankly I like my common sense better than yours. Torture is useless barbarism, simple as.

I'm glad that, at the start, you (correctly) emphasized that we're talking about intelligence gathering. So please don't fall back to the motte of "I only meant that confessions couldn't be trusted", which you're threatening to do by bringing up the judicial system and "people admitting to things". Some posters did that in the last argument, too. I don't know how many times I can repeat that, duh, torture-extracted confessions aren't legitimate. But confessions and intelligence gathering are completely different things.

Torture being immoral is a fully sufficient explanation for it being purged from our systems. So your argument is worse than useless when it comes to effectiveness - because it actually raises the question of why Western intelligence agencies were still waterboarding people in the 2000s. Why would they keep doing something that's both immoral and ineffective? Shouldn't they have noticed?

When you have a prisoner who knows something important, there are lots of ways of applying pressure. Sometimes you can get by with compassion, negotiation, and so on, which is great. But the horrible fact is that pain has always been the most effective way to get someone to do what you want. There will be some people who will never take a deal, who will never repent, but will still break under torture and give you the information you want. Yes, if you have the wrong person they'll make something up. Even if you have the right person but they're holding out, they might feed you false information (which they might do in all other scenarios, too). Torture is a tool in your arsenal that may be the only way to produce that one address or name or password that you never would have gotten otherwise, but you'll still have to apply the other tools at your disposal too.

Sigh. The above paragraph is obvious and not insightful, and I feel silly having to spell it out. But hey, in some sense it's a good thing that there are people so sheltered that they can pretend pain doesn't work to get evil people what they want. It points to how nice a civilization we've built for ourselves, how absent cruelty ("barbarism", as you put it) is from most people's day-to-day existence.

I did once find a study comparing the use of torture in Spanish Inquisition vs. modern USA, which concluded that the former was much more effective because of differences in methods and social context. I hope you will pardon me if I copypaste another a post of mine from elsewhere:

There’s this paper claiming (in the case of the Spanish Inquisition) that there are circumstances in which torture can yield reliable and verifiable information, but only in a very specific setting that is very different from, say, yanking a suspect in an alley and beating a confession out of them. You need extensive prior investigation until you have most of the facts available but think that someone is still withholding information; you need to torture multiple people, repeatedly, while comparing and verifying all the statements you extracted between each instance. At that point you might as well scrap the torture and still be left with the vast majority of reliable information.

Even then, you’ll still end up torturing a large number of innocents, and you will learn very little in the process you didn’t already know. And you will inevitably end up a vast, overbearing police state where everyone lives in terror.

Inquisitors tortured for different reasons, with different goals, based on different assumptions, and in a social, political, and religious setting entirely alien to that of modern interrogators…

The Inquisition put in place a vast bureaucratic apparatus designed to collect and assess information about prohibited practices. It tortured comprehensively, inflicting suffering on large swaths of the population. It tortured systematically, willing to torment all whom it deemed to be withholding evidence, regardless of how severe their heresy was or how significant the evidence was that they were withholding. The Inquisition did not torture because it wanted to fill gaps in its records by tormenting a new witness. On the contrary: it tortured because its records were comprehensive enough to indicate that a witness was withholding evidence.

This torture yielded information that was often reliable and falsifiable: names, locations, events, and practices witnesses provided in the torture chamber matched information provided by those not tortured. But despite the tremendous investment in time, money, and labor that the Inquisition invested in institutionalizing torture, its officials treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism. Tribunals tortured witnesses at the very end of a series of investigations, and they did not rely on the resulting testimony as a primary source of evidence.

This systematic, dispassionate, and meticulous torture stands in stark contrast to the “ticking bomb” philosophy that has motivated US torture policy in the aftermath of 9/11… US interrogators expected to uncover groundbreaking information from detainees: novel, crucial, yet somehow trustworthy. That is an unverifiable standard of intelligence that the Inquisition, despite its vast bureaucratic apparatus and centuries of institutional learning, would not have trusted.

The Inquisition functioned in an extraordinary environment. Its target population was confined within the realms of an authoritarian state in which the Inquisition wielded absolute authority and could draw on near-unlimited resources. The most important of these resources was time… It could afford to spend decades and centuries perfecting its methods and dedicate years to gathering evidence against its prisoners… Should US interrogators aspire to match the confession rate of the Inquisition’s torture campaign, they would have to emulate the Inquisition’s brutal scope and vast resources… one cannot improvise quick, amateurish, and half-hearted torture sessions, motivated by anger and fear, and hope to extract reliable intelligence. Torture that yields reliable intelligence requires a massive social, political, and financial enterprise founded on deep ideological and political commitments. That is the cost of torture.

(an interesting point is that, while the “ticking time bomb” is the scenario most commonly given as justification for torture, it also happens to be the scenario in which torture is least likely to work, because you don’t know if you have the right person, the suspect - especially if guilty - knows they have to resist for a brief time, and you can’t verify any statement until it’s too late)

End copypaste.

So, I admit this is a well-written, convincing argument. It's appreciated! But I still find it contrasts with common sense (and my own lying eyes). I can, say, imagine authorities arresting me and demanding to know my email password. I would not cooperate, and I would expect to be able to get access to a lawyer before long. In reality there's only one way they'd get the password: torturing me. And in that case, they'd get the password immediately. It would be fast and effective. I'm still going to trust the knowledge that torture would work perfectly on me over a sociological essay, no matter how eloquent.

Admittedly passwords make for something like an ideal case for torture in that they can be easily communicated in full and be quickly and unambiguously checked for correctness. I don't know if any other kind of information meets those requirements. Overall, given precedents, I think a blanket ban on judiciary torture is worth a lot more than the marginal improvements in investigation effectiveness, even from a coldly utilitarian perspective, much like a blanket ban on killing patients to harvest their organs is well worth the loss of a small number of additional organs, even if those are perfectly good for use.

Absolutely. And I'm totally being a pedant about a policy I'm in complete agreement with. But this nitpicking is still valuable - if we as a society understand that we're banning torture for very good ideological reasons, then we won't be so tempted to backslide the next time a crisis (like 9/11) arises and people start noticing that (arguably) torture might help us track down more terrorists. Like how some people forget that free speech ideals are important beyond simply making sure that we don't violate the 1st amendment.

Then I guess we agree after all, especially about the nitpicking. Cheers!

The above paragraph is obvious and not insightful

Well yeah, I don't disagree with any of it either so I don't really see what your point is?

it actually raises the question of why Western intelligence agencies were still waterboarding people in the 2000s. Why would they keep doing something that's both immoral and ineffective? Shouldn't they have noticed?

Why should they notice? Institutions do immoral and ineffective things literally all the time for centuries on end. And we're talking about the CIA, the kings of spending money on absolute bullshit that just sounds cool to some dudes in a room, and that's not saying nothing given the competition for that title in USG.

The Stargate project ran for more than 20 years. Does this mean I should think there is something to psychic warfare?

Well yeah, I don't disagree with any of it either so I don't really see what your point is?

But ... if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.

Why should they notice? Institutions do immoral and ineffective things literally all the time for centuries on end. And we're talking about the CIA, the kings of spending money on absolute bullshit that just sounds cool to some dudes in a room, and that's not saying nothing given the competition for that title in USG.

A fair point! I'm never going to argue with "government is incompetent" being an answer. :) But still, agencies using it is evidence that points in the direction of torture being useful - incompetence is just a (very plausible) explanation for why that evidence isn't conclusive.

if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.

I get at this in the other threads: because I think in practice those scenarios are exceedingly rare, and specifically for the US who purports to not be a totalitarian state, essentially nonexistent.

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