Topic: Non-Verbal Analysis of statements by Mark and Adam (MtGox) - page 3. (Read 7735 times)

I have no time to explain to you anything, I am not interested in writing a paper in a bitcoin forum.
Either you take it, or you leave it, that's my deal.
By the way, I see you also suffered from selection bias since I already explained it in the post about the nature of my skills, but I am rational enough to realize that I can't use it to attack you back with it because that would be fallacious.

Have a good day

For the record 2: As I said, you prejudged me without knowing anything.
The volume was off the first time I watched it. There were very inconsistent gestures that were very awkward so I had to turn on the sound.
1) The lags in the teleconference were causing weird situations.
2) After turning on the sound I realized that the constant gazes were because Mark wasn't fluent in English and he had difficulty understanding the English pronunciation of the interviewer.
Without contemplating this, I would have reached to wrong conclusions.
Secondly, to properly assess the truthfulness, it is important to contrast the verbal expression with the non-verbal verbal expression and the context. It is way more complicated than you think.

Haha :-)

I'm not doubting him because he was pioneering, I'm only saying that if it's legit, it WILL be duplicated/confirmed by other researchers, and I always like to see that.

I'm asking if you know if thats been done.

Allright then. Please tell me your experience, what you analyzed, how you did it, what you've been trained with, and your rate of successful profiling. So far, I understand that you are a psychology major and are not FACS certified. I assume that those are your highest credentials.

I forgot to mention in my earlier post that the biggest mistake that I noticed that prompted my rant was that you biased yourself by watching this video and performing the analysis with the volume on. I actually hope I'm right here, because I question the sanity of anyone who watched that video twice. That, and also being involved generally in bitcoin and likely Mt. Gox does not make you an impartial analyst.

Yep, I purposely ignored your disclaimer. You should know that disclaimers don't guard you from criticism when you're attempting to make a professional analysis such as this. Pre-med students would be idiotic to go around saying things like, "Well in my opinion, you have haemochromatosis, but this is not to be taken as medical advice." If you're not that confident in your statement, especially given the repercussions, don't make it. There's no backsies when diagnosing people. If you were well-certified professional with credentials that we could all be confident in, then your analysis would be not taken lightly. It could have real monetary, and potentially legal impact on the situation at hand. Magic isn't a plaything, Harry. You are toying with forces that you do not understand! Oh sorry, slipped into another personality there.

Anyway, by deflecting my criticisms by declaring exemption due to a disclaimer, you are essentially indicating that professionalism doesn't matter worth a crap, which doesn't exactly give me confidence in your science.

Thank you, however, for acknowledging and responding kindly to my long and grammatically-questionable post.

Very interesting analysis bitsalame.

It indeed makes more sense, all those bitcoins belonging to MtGox... maybe the hacker even knew that, since he had access to an auditor's computer, and somehow knew where to start looking for coins. Maybe the "auditor" computer had the password to the super-rich account. Actually, maybe the "auditor" wasn't an auditor, but just one of their employees who happened to have access to the whole database and money.

It surprises me anyway, 500.000 coins... that's a lot of revenue for their service... it's indeed a business with a lot of space for more competition!

Just my criticism though: you should be careful before calling such technique a "science". It's as scientific as meteorology or other "sciences" which can't really be trusted... there's no logical way to build knowledge over axioms, and by using an empirical approach, how can you isolate all variables, distinguish interference and all? Anyways, maybe I'm just being too much of a purist here.

Paul Ekman is very respected in the academic circle. Doubting about his integrity because he was pioneering, it is like doubting of Einstein for being unique in Physics.
Maureen O'Sullivan is the another leading academic in deception research, both Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan are together in the Diogenes Project where they study people who are naturally gifted in detecting deception at a rate of 80% or more.

This research also revealed that law enforcement aren't particularly successful in detecting lies (actually agents in the Secret Service scored below chance LOL).

BTW bitsalame,

do you have any other research names I can look up? Im intrigued, but also wary of any research primarily driven by one guy. Always safer to have confirming instances.

For example, this research seems to offer a less optomistic view:

Detecting deception from emotional and unemotional cues.
Authors:
    Warren, Gemma, Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom, [email protected]
    Schertler, Elizabeth, Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom
    Bull, Peter, Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom
Source:
    Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, Vol 33(1), Mar, 2009. pp. 59-69.
Abstract:
    Encoders were video recorded giving either truthful or deceptive descriptions of video footage designed to generate either emotional or unemotional responses. Decoders were asked to indicate the truthfulness of each item, what cues they used in making their judgments, and then to complete both the Micro Expression Training Tool (METT) and Subtle Expression Training Tool (SETT). Although overall performance on the deception detection task was no better than chance, performance for emotional lie detection was significantly above chance, while that for unemotional lie detection was significantly below chance. Emotional lie detection accuracy was also significantly positively correlated with reported use of facial expressions and with performance on the SETT, but not on the METT. The study highlights the importance of taking the type of lie into account when assessing skill in deception detection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

Emphasis mine.

Not judging, just curious all things psych.

You should research about the "project diogenes".

Although I really like the show "Lie to me" and have read Ekman's books. I must stand firmly behind Horkabork's positions - for they are identical to my own. I'm a biopsychology recent graduate. I've discussed Ekman's techniques with a cognitive neuroscience PhD - and the consensus is - in short. There is not enough evidence to fully support Ekman's theory yet - enough to make it functional. That is, making the predictions actually accurate.

His work in inter-cultural expressions is definitely of interest though.

Guys: GO OUTSIDE

While your analysis is interesting, I think that you know better than to attempt to practice a method of lie detection that is both very inaccurate and very misleading if used by someone who does not have a great deal of experience. I'm not saying that the science is inaccurate, but that you should know that YOU don't know enough about this to practice it on strangers for the benefit of the public. You're hurting your reputation as a science major. You're also presenting your "findings" of truth or deception as truth or deception, when, in fact, each gesture, expression, or apparent emotion can point to a multitude of other conditions. If you're going to do this, please at least list them with probabilities along with the dominant/combined findings.

By findings, I don't mean interpretation of gestures, expression, microexpressions, or apparent emotions but only the states that they could point to. You should know better than to attempt to interpret the communicated message behind a perceived behavior. Dr. Ekman found that expressions might be consistent across cultures in the states that they point to, but the communicated nonverbal message is a crapshoot. Expression analysis, for example, is troublesome when used by trained soldiers interviewing potential terrorists (they have to phrase questions very specifically). I mention this because your subject is a French(?) guy speaking English that he obviously can't fully understand, living in Japan, and unable to hear his mumbling, badly-miked interviewer half the time, let alone understand him.

If you really want to do this, run everything you did by a psychology professor and have him post. If you can't get anyone to do this, well, there's a sign. Part of good science is realizing that you have inadequate skills to interpret results properly. Especially if you're essentially diagnosing humans. Especially when crime is involved. Especially if you have a reputation to earn or keep. Especially if you don't have credentials or someone with credentials to provide evidence as to your skill level. Especially when you are making judgements that affect someone's reputation. Especially when you're trying to do something that only a fraction of clinical psychology grad students would attempt to do in a public forum for the sake of, well, entertainment. Dude, this is the psychology equivalent of a pre-med major doing knee surgery. Yeah, he might get the fundamentals taken care of, but it's not good for anyone involved.

And you should note that this criticism has little to do with the science. I likely don't know the science as well as you, but I do know that you don't know it half as well as you think you do, or else you wouldn't be doing it here. Even a well-trained psychology professional with years of experience in lie detection would be very reluctant to write what you wrote about an internet video. Well, at least without lots of prior footage of the subjects and/or the ability to ask the questions themselves.

You admit that you aren't trained, but your idol Dr. Ekman says that something like 0.2% of people have the ability to semi-accurately perceive microexpressions without training. I would wager that an even much smaller fraction can, untrained, translate those perceived microexpressions into a reasonably certain analysis.

Your decision to providing this analysis alone, regardless of the content or quality of the analysis, basically screams "I have poor judgement". Since apparently having a handful of undergraduate psychology classes is enough to allow you to nearly write libel, that's my psychological analysis.

Please for the love of god don't take what I'm saying here as tearing you up for the sake of being a jerk. I would absolutely love it if you could do an analysis like that but could back it up. I also greatly encourage you to continue your studies, but to be very self-critical and skeptical, because yours is a field that has humans as the lab rats, so mistakes are often costly.

I don't know what the hell they meant by that as it's not an otc trading platform, facilitating exchange between individuals, like bitmarket.eu is.  You deposit your money in their accounts and they exchange it, transferring funds between multiple individuals.  They are always your counter party.  The BTC and USD traded there were not 'real' but just mtgox credits, which they could have created and manipulated at will.  Some people have been suggesting that the hack was so bad that the 500k BTC perhaps never existed.  

Interesting analysis. This is why I'm always gratified to see people's faces recorded on video so that we can have access to this kind of data. I wonder if they will show their faces publicly ever again.

Are you making an informed opinion or just making a supposition from hunch?
All sciences have margin of errors, and there are many ways of minimizing false positives (and false negatives).
It is a very serious area of research, and there is strong empirical evidence too that supports non-verbal communication.
What it is known in academia it is usually mixed with crap in the books available to the public... (and definitely it is almost never like what they show on TV lol)

Precisely, seeing the whole picture it is essential to a proper analysis.
It is called the baseline. For example, when the question about MtGox's account is popped out triggers a series of gestures and microexpressions that aren't repeated ever again in the whole video.
It indicates that "something is going on", but we can't be certain the real reasons of that feeling. To find out that requires more digging.
There are many types of gestures that reveals different things each of them with different degrees of confidence.
It is mostly a probability game, the more coherent and supporting signs, the higher the confidence.

Cheers,
bitsalame

That's why many things are taken into consideration all at once. 

The chance of a false positive is too high for it to be useful.

What if Mark thought nobody would ever know because the bitcoin accounts are held by him, and bitcoins are an anonymous currency?

It would have been a violation of their own terms : "mtgox does not act as a counter party to any trades".

Uhm, that is too much conjecture. If they make a video responding to that question, let me know


Yeah, that was also my main hypothesis, but this is the first time I have some supporting evidence.
That's why I was so excited on watching this video