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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Just like any tool there are situations where it can be effective and situations where it isn't. If your goal is getting true information the key is having ways to confirm the information then come back if the information was incorrect. Repeat. Another method is having multiple people with the same information, you then separate and torture them until their stories match.

But you see the contradiction right? Torture is a clumsy tool that's only comparatively useful in situations where nothing else is available, but those conditions are precisely when it is least effective.

Rejali points this out in Torture and Democracy:

In short, organized torture yields poor information, sweeps up many innocents, degrades organizational capabilities, and destroys interrogators. Limited time during battle or emergency intensifies all these problems.

In the sort of scenarios you describe, where the intelligence can be checked and consequences applied for inaccuracy, threats to hostages are a superior form of extracting information or behavior since they don't degrade the subject, the interrogator, organizational capability, and aren't subject to as many moral hazards.

Hence why, outside of contrived circumstances, torture is useless as a means of intelligence: it's a bad tool in the absolute, and it gets even worse when the conditions call of it over other methods.

This sounds like a just world fallacy.

I'd really like to see someone admit "sometimes torture works the best, but we still shouldn't do it".

The world has no obligation to be just, but it has no obligation to be maximally unjust either: it may be suspiciously convenient that sacrificing children to Moloch for rain doesn't work, but it also happens to be true.

It's kinda funny because the whole reason for torture to be immoral in the first place is that it's unnecessary. So you can accuse any argument as to its inefficacy of this without cost. Sometimes the world happens to be just.

I hold that torture is worse than any other method of obtaining intelligence unless you do not care about the stated problems. Or, like I assume most people who engage in it, don't actually care at all about intelligence gathering.

Torture is a tool of psychological warfare, not intelligence.

I hold that torture is worse than any other method of obtaining intelligence unless you do not care about the stated problems.

This is true of all methods of doing all things.

No it's not? Sigint doesn't have any of those specific problems.

I’ll bite. There are rules, it’s good to have to have rules. Maybe those rules could be broken occasionally, but not in the sort of clandestine, oversight-avoiding scenario that prisons encourage.

Of course, this is a lot easier to say precisely because I have little faith that it’s implemented effectively. Not leaving as much on the table.

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