Does torture work?

[Josquius]

Morals aside.

I only told you I'd done it so you'd take the electrodes off my balls?

[garbon]

Needs more nuance.

[Eddie Teach]

If there's verifiable intel, yes.

[LaCroix]

always

[Grey Fox]

Yes, you always get someone to blame.

[mongers]

Yes, this four year program of it, will have all of us screaming for mercy.

[Grinning_Colossus]

It's effective at extracting confessions, and torturers often gain a good deal of enjoyment from it. It presumably also discourages people from opposing the torturing authority.

[DGuller]

Realistically speaking, it often does.  Soviet police has been known to use torture extensively, and they solved a large percentage of the cases.  Often more than once.

[derspiess]

You'll never get an answer out of me.

[Liep]

Realistically speaking, it often does.  Soviet police has been known to use torture extensively, and they solved a large percentage of the cases.  Often more than once.

[Berkut]

Does it "usually" work?

I don't have any idea how to answer that. It doesn't seem like a "usual" thing.

Can it work? Of course.

Can it also not work? Of course.

I better general question would be something like "Ignoring the moral implications, can torture be an effective means under some circumstances of extracting useful information?"

I think the answer to that question is "Yes".

[garbon]

I better general question would be something like "Ignoring the moral implications, can torture be an effective means under some circumstances of extracting useful information?"

I think the answer to that question is "Yes".

I mean I guess that's better as it has an answer choice that makes sense (unlike current poll) but a little too akin to Der's silly poll that had only one real answer.

[Tamas]

Well if you use enough torture SOMEBODY will tell you what you want to hear, that's for sure. I guess that makes it highly efficient.

[Berkut]

Well if you use enough torture SOMEBODY will tell you what you want to hear, that's for sure. I guess that makes it highly efficient.

It does if your goal is getting someone to tell you something you want to hear.

If the goal is to actually extract actionable intelligence "what you want to hear" is both not useful, and usually not even known to the person being interrogated.

[The Minsky Moment]

I better general question would be something like "Ignoring the moral implications, can torture be an effective means under some circumstances of extracting useful information?"

That's a better general question but still not a good one.  It's a very low bar.  Just about any technique can be effective under *some* circumstances, e.g. the broken clock tells the time correctly twice every day.  There are whole categories of game theoretic problems where the optimal strategy is to randomly vary responses, but that doesn't mean that a magic 8-ball or a quarter is a useful decision making tool. 

It's true that torture is likely to yield information - the question is how useful or reliable that information and what cost is to be assigned to the receipt of unreliable information.  If it turns out ex post that you can point to individual instances where the information turned out to be useful, that doesn't mean it makes sense as a technique to use a priori.