Comments on: Legal threat for criticising neurobabble ‘lie detector’

By: Evil Wes

Evil Wes — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:11:48 +0000

First Post: New here, and am very impressed with this site. Anyway, concerning the above post:
Will Someone please tell me how any civil court judge could ever let this case go to trial. Am I correct in reading that this man is being sued for writing an opinion/research piece criticizing a product. Ummm isn’t that free speech, and don’t we do it all the time with customer evaluations and product reviews. Good thing is, since its a public (famous) plaintiff, the burden of proof should fall on them to disprove the libel or slander claims…the opposite is true if its two private citizens going at it.
It just scares me that this gentleman might lose a lawsuit for doing what we all have the right to do. If he loses, what’s next, abortion clinics suing protesters because it is hurting business?
Aloha,
Evil Wes

By: Neuroskeptic

Neuroskeptic — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:55:28 +0000

It might be of interest that Nemesysco have released a response to the controversy:
see here

By: harryb

harryb — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:35:21 +0000

Joesph – the ‘Who is Mr Liberman’ section is unusual, but not as bad as you represent it: the visit to the Nemesysco office was not made by a friend, but by a Swedish journalist who does not appear to be affiliated with the authors. The account of that visit was published in a Swedish newspaper.
The ‘friend’ who was consulted was an ‘active speech science researcher’ in Israel who simply said that he did not know Mr Liberman.
Given that the thesis of the article is that layered voice analysis is entirely fraudulent, it’s not so unreasonable to point out that its developer has no formal training in speech analysis and indeed holds no academic degree.

By: joseph lehmann

joseph lehmann — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 08:54:23 +0000

When reading the article and visiting the company site, one can wonder what might be the full story.
The article is quite unusual for a scientific article. For example, it has a section titled “who is Mr. Liberman?” addressing a private person and claiming that he is a charlatan based on a visit by a friend made to a private company.
On the other hand, no matter what we believe, one can not just wave off claims for scientific research for detecting emotions. In fact, neuroscience and artificial intelligence aim to much more than that.
It might be interesting to have the arguments of both sides rather than such a one sided story. One may wonder why the publishers pulled out the article. This happened in the UK.

By: Lilian Nattel

Lilian Nattel — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:16:24 +0000

It’s too bad they can put a chill on a journal like that. Good thing the internet gets around it.