The article about the old WWII interrogators is making the rounds:
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chessor Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm,90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
I'm sure the information the World War II men got was of much higher quality. If you try to extract hard-to-verify information from someone who is, at the moment, burning with hatred at you for torturing or humiliating them, they're almost certainly going to lie. That's part of the reason torture is rarely used by people who are genuinely interested in acquiring new information. (It's more often used by people like witch hunters and Communists trying to set up show trials, who know exactly what they want to hear, and don't care whether their victims are lying.) But if you work hard, over an extended period, at setting up the kinds of situations in which social bonds develop between human beings, you'll get information that actually has some value.
