About five years ago I got in the middle of an internet discussion about torture. It took place in the comments section of a blog that strongly opposed legalizing torture as means for national security agencies to gather intelligence in extremely important national security cases, for two reasons: 1) because torture is morally reprehensible and 2) because it's ineffective in terms of providing reliable intelligence due to the fact that torture victims will say anything, come up with any lie to make the pain stop, so that the information they provide is completely unreliable. I wrote a comment agreeing with the first point but disagreeing with the second, and provided a few examples showing that torture can sometimes "work" (i.e. generate truthful, actionable intelligence that could not have been procured otherwise).
I've had many replies, with one consistent theme in most of them: that my examples weren't plausible because everyone knows that torture victims will say anything and come up with any lie they can think of to make the pain stop. I started replying to this theme, my reply being something to the effect of that sometimes there probably are situations such that, even though the torturer doesn't know what the truth is (otherwise why torture anyone in the first place), he nonetheless has some knowledge as to what the truth is not, which means he can tell if his victim is lying to him. As I was drafting this reply, I realized I was full of shit: I didn't have the first clue if that was indeed the reason why torture worked in my examples, or any examples, and that I was basically making it up as I went along. I also realized something more important: that I didn't have to answer this question in the first place, that the argument was already over and I had won it.
You have a clever and a priori very plausible theory as to why event X can't happen. One way for me to disprove your theory is to find an instance of event X having happened. All I need is a counterexample. I don't have to come up with a counter-theory that explains why your theory doesn't work. I don't have to understand why X happens; I can be as mystified and baffled by it as you are. Your theory says X is impossible. I show you that X happened. Since X happened, it is obviously possible, and I don't need to know why it's possible to know that your theory must be wrong.
I've had many replies, with one consistent theme in most of them: that my examples weren't plausible because everyone knows that torture victims will say anything and come up with any lie they can think of to make the pain stop. I started replying to this theme, my reply being something to the effect of that sometimes there probably are situations such that, even though the torturer doesn't know what the truth is (otherwise why torture anyone in the first place), he nonetheless has some knowledge as to what the truth is not, which means he can tell if his victim is lying to him. As I was drafting this reply, I realized I was full of shit: I didn't have the first clue if that was indeed the reason why torture worked in my examples, or any examples, and that I was basically making it up as I went along. I also realized something more important: that I didn't have to answer this question in the first place, that the argument was already over and I had won it.
You have a clever and a priori very plausible theory as to why event X can't happen. One way for me to disprove your theory is to find an instance of event X having happened. All I need is a counterexample. I don't have to come up with a counter-theory that explains why your theory doesn't work. I don't have to understand why X happens; I can be as mystified and baffled by it as you are. Your theory says X is impossible. I show you that X happened. Since X happened, it is obviously possible, and I don't need to know why it's possible to know that your theory must be wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment