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Kash Patel Is Polygraphing FBI Staff to Find Out if They’re Being Mean About Him
(www.thedailybeast.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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Polygraph measures nervousness, not lies.
So innocent people fail them. And guilty people pass them.
All this does is make remaing people hate him
People who use lie detectors as a machine they think can detect lies are stupid.
The real purpose of the lie detector is to trick the suspect into thinking it can detect lies, to the point where they confess.
Ancient trick. The voodoo magic chicken. "This chicken can tell all lies from truth, and it says you are lying." Who doesn't believe in voodoo magic? So the thief, knowing the jig is up, confesses.
I mean. They're FBI agents....
They all have already had to take at least one to get in, even though they all would have looked into them first and know they don't work. That's still not as bad as the guy having to administer the tests who definitely knows it's bullshit.
It's my favorite example of what happens when we let politicians set rules to govern bureaucrats.
The only reason it's still given is no one high enough in the FBI to be listened to has managed to explain to a president why it's stupid.
A lot of our government is shit because high ranking bureaucrats are shitty are explaining things to idiots
I'm Canadian so idk about FBI, but I do know a guy that became an RCMP officer, and he said they administered a polygraph, and he indicated everyone seemed to believe it was a real thing.
Isn't that just the police?
FBI almost always have a criminology or psychology degree and know way before applying to the FBI that the test doesn't work.
But the type of person to join the FBI would 100% Google it first and read studies. At least wikipedia.
Jocks go CIA, nerds go FBI.
It's not as true as it used to be, especially with so many new agencies over the last 20 years, but it's generally true.
That’s weird, I would have thought the other way around. Jocks go fbi, nerds go cia. Or at least NSA.
But anyway, Patel should then also know better, so why bother polygraohing people?
FBI has much stricter rules of engagement...
The CIA operates abroad and historically can do whatever they want including but not limited to full on government coups.
But yeah, since 9/11 we've got like 3x the security agencies. People can go anywhere now
The RCMP is the federal police that investigate federal crimes, like the FBI, and also do local policing for areas without a local police force.
Nowadays the nerds either go corporate or are too autistic to apply to anything.
While that is true, they have several techniques to make people nervous specifically about their lies.
They ask them baseline questions such as their name to establish general nervousness. They can give the list of questions beforehand so that your expectation of the question you plan to lie about will make you more nervous.
And then there are ways to avoid lies causing nervousness. The best one is that some people can convince themselves that the lie is the truth. Other methods include certain drugs or distracting yourself in certain ways.
I know you are trying to be informative and nothing you said is wrong, but that opening sentence makes it sound like you are defending the practice of polygraphy which is pseudoscientific, inaccurate, and unethical. I have a feeling most downvoters never got past that first sentence.
I understand, but if I wrote comments with those types of people in mind, I'd never be able to say anything worthwhile.
The problem is the platform. There should be no option to downvote comments. It should just be upvote, reply, and report. Allowing people to downvote comments only leads to this sort of antisocial anti-intellectual behavior.
Pish-posh! Proofreading can help with that as can thinking about your audience. It’s certainly a skill that needs to be developed, but you have plenty of interesting points to make and only have to tweak the presentation. For example, you could preface your post with a statement of intent.
“Look, I’m not defending the practice but…” would do.
For example, I was raised evangelical and am now a deconstructed atheist. I still interject regularly on scriptural topics that people frequently get wrong, which can result in others assuming I am an advocate. I am not, so I try to preface those kinds of statements with qualifiers.
This is a lot of effort simply to avoid comment downvotes, and I did in fact hedge my comment in the first four words.
This is going to sound tautological, but comment downvotes against my comments only express the opinions of the type of person who would downvote my comments. It's like that quote about not playing chess against a pigeon. If anything, I want them to respond to my comment so that I know who they are. I'd argue that if the platform allows comment downvotes, and this goes only for comment downvotes, not for upvotes, or post votes, but if the platform allows comment downvotes, then it should also allow any user to see who downvoted the comment. If my hedge in the first four words of my comment isn't enough to convince people to have enough curiosity to read past the first sentence, then the truth is that I don't think they're worth my time. If they're the type of people who downvote my comment, then I don't really want anything to do with them. It's simply evidence of bad behavior.
Y'all downvoting OP for laying out the methodology.
If you want to make informed decisions, you have to start with the truth. Imagine if people listened to that guy and someday took a lie detector test, only to realize too late that people do get nervous specifically when they lie, and that the test is designed to enhance that.
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