[RichardCA]

Astrology, Tarot, and Fortune Telling are all pseudoscience, but a good practitioner is going to be very good at Cold Reading.

http://skepdic.com/coldread.html

It works as long as the "mark" is naive. As James Randi explained many times.

Which is why intelligence communities want to suppress information about polygraphs that would make people less naive.

Makes perfect sense.

[unishark]

Being good at cold reading does not mean you can actually predict the future, which is what they are claiming to do. But if they could do so with sufficiently high accuracy to accomplish something useful, then this would still be interesting.

And frankly I think the "pseudoscience" label for lie detectors is a stretch. It measures a genuine signal. The issue is the relation of this signal with lying. They do a lot of strategy in their question selection to try and make this relation hold. And to me (trained in actual science) it makes a decent degree of sense. If it fails to deliver due to there being way too many variables and noise, so be it. But it's not magic or something like psychics. There is legitimate research related to determining emotion with various types of sensors. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=review+wearables+emotio...