In many circumstances the unreliable information provided by torture is the best you can get.
This seems equivalent to saying 'it is better to have ten wrong hypotheses than none'. Do you see the error?
Even if one of the hypotheses you arrive at after torture ends up giving you enough to go on, to eventually acquire more information by other means and arrive at the truth, it could have happened any of the following ways:
* The subject simply guessed, and happened to be right.
* The subject gave you information you already knew, but hadn't followed up yet. This information was passed to the subject during the torture, either deliberately or through unconscious bias.
* The subject had some actionable information, and torture compelled him to give it to you.
For the most part you, as the torturer, will have no way of knowing which of these it happened to be. In the first two cases, you are dumber after the torture session than before it. In the third case, you are smarter after the torture session, but not as smart as you could have been.
If it was the first case, you would have been better off guessing at a hypotheses yourself and following that up, than soliciting the subject via torture to provide you several hypotheses of his own. You, as the torturer, are not yourself being tortured, and are probably in a clearer state of mind and better able to guess an hypotheses that might be useful.
If it's the second, the subject is only giving you information you already knew, but he's also giving you a bunch of specious information that you're going to waste time following up. You're worse off than before you tortured the subject.
For the third, congratulations! You have successfully extracted some true information from a subject via the method of torture. You won't know for sure at the time, of course, so you'll have to go to extra lengths to be sure of the information, and you're still likely to have acquired some specious information in addition to the truth. So you'll still waste time following up those leads like in case 2. But you did achieve some small victory. Since in the case where the subject does actually know something you want, there are also provably more reliable ways of getting it than torture, you have still created extra work for yourself, but you'll still be able to put on your report that torture 'worked'. You also endangered the lives of fellow citizens abroad, and reduced your government negotiating leverage against other nations and individuals somewhat, but if you don't care about any of that shit, then you can call this a win and go have a beer. You've earned it.
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This seems equivalent to saying 'it is better to have ten wrong hypotheses than none'. Do you see the error?
Even if one of the hypotheses you arrive at after torture ends up giving you enough to go on, to eventually acquire more information by other means and arrive at the truth, it could have happened any of the following ways:
* The subject simply guessed, and happened to be right.
* The subject gave you information you already knew, but hadn't followed up yet. This information was passed to the subject during the torture, either deliberately or through unconscious bias.
* The subject had some actionable information, and torture compelled him to give it to you.
For the most part you, as the torturer, will have no way of knowing which of these it happened to be. In the first two cases, you are dumber after the torture session than before it. In the third case, you are smarter after the torture session, but not as smart as you could have been.
If it was the first case, you would have been better off guessing at a hypotheses yourself and following that up, than soliciting the subject via torture to provide you several hypotheses of his own. You, as the torturer, are not yourself being tortured, and are probably in a clearer state of mind and better able to guess an hypotheses that might be useful.
If it's the second, the subject is only giving you information you already knew, but he's also giving you a bunch of specious information that you're going to waste time following up. You're worse off than before you tortured the subject.
For the third, congratulations! You have successfully extracted some true information from a subject via the method of torture. You won't know for sure at the time, of course, so you'll have to go to extra lengths to be sure of the information, and you're still likely to have acquired some specious information in addition to the truth. So you'll still waste time following up those leads like in case 2. But you did achieve some small victory. Since in the case where the subject does actually know something you want, there are also provably more reliable ways of getting it than torture, you have still created extra work for yourself, but you'll still be able to put on your report that torture 'worked'. You also endangered the lives of fellow citizens abroad, and reduced your government negotiating leverage against other nations and individuals somewhat, but if you don't care about any of that shit, then you can call this a win and go have a beer. You've earned it.