This is hypothetical - the glasses don’t fact-check what people say, they somehow detect willful deception, like people expect polygraphs to do, but with high accuracy. Would people welcome these, fear them, object on privacy grounds? I think it would be very contentious. Would people feel different if they only fed the information to the wearer but didn’t record or send it anywhere? What exactly would the issues be?
object on privacy grounds
That would be the reasonable thing to do.
- 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.
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)
I agree with these points, but you should talk to the other person here who said without lies civilization would collapse in a couple minutes. Quite the spectrum of beliefs.
Politicians would very quickly ban the thing “for our own security”
But we already know politicians are lying and they still win elections,
Can definitely see that happening.
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.
I would start being overly honest and forthcoming about things I don’t currently bring up because doing so isn’t polite. Wouldn’t want to lie by omission!
Anarchy in the streets immediately. Imagine how many romantic, professional and social relationships would be tested right away.
Politicians
That’s what I was thinking with the social aspect.
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.
Might be a problem with narcissists who believe their own lies?
True, if it’s designed to detect deceit it won’t detect self-delusion.
Lawyers would be fucked.
It’s devastating to my case!
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.
To sum that up, are you saying people would find reasons to disbelieve that their heroes and icons are lying? I was thinking more along the lines of personal contact - everyday conversations, business deals, etc.
Yep. Their heroes, icons, leaders, family… and themselves.
Hell, they’d disbelieve if the glasses detected someone was telling the truth, but they didn’t want to believe that!
It would destroy civilization instantly, since it relies on lies all the way down.
If I look in a mirror, will they detect when I’m lying to myself? Take my money.
Only if you’re doing it on purpose.
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).
Do you know what a thought experiment is
Yeah you’re not understanding what “hypothetical” means - it means suppose this happens, not asking if it can. Like if I asked how FTL space travel would change our culture, it’s the culture part I’m interested in, not the physics being impossible.
Technically, shouldn’t the fact that brain activity ultimately has a physical basis (various chemical and electrical signals moving around and such) imply that, if a person lying knows they’re lying, there should be some physical difference between that brain and the brain of an otherwise identical individual saying the same thing, but believing it to be true? Measuring that and interpreting the data might be an impractically difficult problem to solve, sure, but if there truly were no physical difference, that would have to imply that at some level, thinking is a supernatural process that at least partly occurs outside the physical universe, which is both something no evidence exists for, and would seem in contradiction to things we do observe, like how damage to the brain changes and impairs a person’s thinking
