Reverse-engineering torture
Saw Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, interviewed on OETA last night. As someone who follows research techniques relating to “actionable intelligence“, I am sickened by the story she has to tell about the turn that the SERE program has taken. As someone who is proud to be an American citizen, I am outraged. And as someone who believes that rigorously-tested theories as the product of open scientific research can be our best hopes of making a better global society, I am shocked and saddened by the whole sordid mess. Clearly, this deliberate misuse of Seligman’s “learned helplessness” theory in an effort to gain information from prisoners was not only useless, but wrong on every level. (As I found in my own dissertation, once a theory “diffuses,” the original theorist cannot and does not control the subsequent direction of that particular theory, though this particular instance of diffusion is indeed murky. I note that Dr. Seligman himself now works on “learned optimism,” ironically enough.)
