The machine itself is a bit of what magicians call the misdirect. You're all focused on the machine, but it's actually the questions and the rituals and the penumbra, all the things that are going on around it, which make the polygraph successful in quote marks.
You might also like
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. And what we are is largely what we have consented to become, through the daily, unremarked choices that accumulate into a character — and finally a fate.
Anaïs Nin — Seduction of the Minotaur
As journalists, it can feel like the incentives of our tribe are almost always to ask: what's bad about this? But it is a particularly hollow and timid kind of journalism that finds itself unable to also ask: what could go right?
Casey Newton
Holmes is a very special and powerful kind of liar — someone for whom deception and manipulation are as automatic and as continuous as breathing.
Noah Smith