Comment by puppycodes
5 hours ago
The only way polygraphs work is by convincing people its an actual lie detection machine. Cops leveredge this belief and tell you that you "failed miserably" so you ultimately confess because "your caught".
They are about as accurate as flipping a coin.
Sure, but that's an argument against them ever being used in the screening process they use for people joining, not to only exempt specific high-level appointees.
> They are about as accurate as flipping a coin.
They are actually worse than a coin toss.
The TV news show, "60 Minutes" tested several companies that provided polygraph testing services.
The show claimed some one stole some equipment. For each testing service the show said they suspected a different employee. In every case, the polygraph operator claimed they detected deception in the person they had been told by the show was the person already under suspicion. Polygraph is total bullshit, just used to add a pseudo-scientific shine to prejudice.
That's beside the paint of political appointees getting special treatment. Patel's FBI has been using polygraphs extensively to test political loyalty
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/us/politics/fbi-polygraph...
Which is a distraction from the fact that taking one is part of the process, and for no reason senior appointees have been exempted.
It would be a different matter if the entire process was being removed as policy, but nope, that's not it.
I don’t think either one is a distraction. Corruption at the highest levels of government is a serious problem. Government reliance on pseudoscience is a serious problem.
This is not accurate.
Polygraphs are not detecting lies, they're used to assess your sensitivities; there are really talented interrogators in counterintelligence, whose full-time job is to fuck with you in subtle ways. To poly a person at will is very much a power move, and some guys fucking love it. But that's a different story all together. Most of the time it's a formality like everything else. In reality, people don't have remotely enough bandwidth to pursue stuff like that unless there's a genuine investigation. But office politics people will office-politique.
Unpopular opinion: private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews. Food for thought.
> private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews.
Useful in what sense? That you can't figure out anyway what tested person is capable of because tested person can believe that they have skills on godlike senior level, but they are junior at best?
Yes I’m also curious. From what I know polygraphs and similar interrogation are for assessing whether there is anything that could be used to blackmail or compromise you. Whether one agrees with the method, the goal seems logical for intelligence orgs. For companies, industrial espionage would be the obvious parallel. I don’t know how polygraphs would relate to culture fit though… watching to see if candidates perspire and their heart beats faster when asked if they have grit and value diversity :)
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Thankfully, it is illegal for private companies to do that.
Unless you work in a pharmacy. Or you’re a ‘mall-cop’. Or literally any employee anywhere who is suspected of fraud or embezzlement or any “incident that resulted in a specific economic loss to the employer”.
Unfortunately, that doesn't really prevent companies from doing things being illegal if they turn out to be profitable enough. You could use a multispectral hidden camera and an mmwave radar fed into 'AI' to simulate a lie detector - you can definitely get pulse and breathing rate out of it, probably also perspiration..
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> Unpopular opinion: private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews. Food for thought.
Because what we need is more inscrutable judgement calls in the interview process?
Unpopular because it’s a bad idea. You’re now hiring better liars and scaring away humble talent.
> Unpopular opinion: private companies should poly people more often in hiring, it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews. Food for thought.
OK. I'll bite. I'm interviewing with you to be a frontend developer. You have me hooked up to a polygraph. What do you ask?
“Have you ever used a <table> for non-tabular data to avoid looking up the CSS grid syntax?”
> "This is not accurate"
I don't get what you thought was inaccurate?
I couldn't disagree with you more about your unpopular opinion.
I've been hiring for years and imo the best interview is a trial period doing the actual work with the actual team, not cop movie cosplay.
> whose full-time job is to fuck with you in subtle ways.
And this is a process that you expect to produce an output with any predictive value what so ever?
> it could prove more useful than other arbitrary kind of culture fit interviews.
You could also just end up selecting for psychopaths and sociopaths for whom this test does not function, regardless of how much you "fuck with them."
I did paint a cynical picture, so please do take it with a grain of salt.
Poly is just one tool, and it's never a solution to anything. What you say about potential abuses, undesirable selection, etc. I agree 100% and hate the office-politique jockeys as much as the next man. In most corporate environments, fucking with people has no place and use, but it's far from only application, in fact it's pretty much the worst application possible. Doesn't change the fact that it happens, even though it shouldn't. I also believe that it's important for many orgs to start taking security seriously; in the world where there's so much exploitation, and where applicable, it helps a lot if your org can have some kind of counterintel function. It doesn't have to include poly, but whatever helps you better understand the people you work with is surely a boon.
That's not as accurate as flipping a coin. It's a certain success or a probabilistic failure. A random coin flip could get you the wrong answer either way. But here, if someone confesses to something, you can be sure it's true. (unless you pass the threshold where people would rather lie that they did bad things, but that's a different problem... if you're getting the same results as torture, the interviewer is the problem, not the fake machine)