That’s a bit of a distortion, isn’t it? maybe you should try reading what I said.
I’m not trying to prove any paranormal ability here. What I’m showing is the dishonesty and incompitence of Randi.
The fact is Randi repeatedly issued a challenge to “find a dry spot” Randi declared that it would be a “better test” of ability. I say finding dry spots is easy, Randi says its paranormal.
Randi is a complete isiot. It was foolish to offer the test in the first place. He has negligible scientific knowledge, and an utter inability to design tests properly. Then when I accepted his test, the way he behaved shows him to be a weasel.
By the way, the purpose of the test is to challenge people to prove their claims. According to you, anyone that takes the test really believing that their claim real must be lying. Anyone that can really perform shouldn’t take the test, according to you.
No, he says that if you are claiming a paranormal ability it would be a better test than finding water.
No, you have that the wrong way round, and have omitted a vitally essential element. The prupose of the challenge is to test people’s claims of paranormal ability.
Imagine there’s an expert marksman who has a challenge out for you to beat him in a shooting contest. There are a few takers but no winners.
Some soon sing the praises of a group of shooters who fill a shotgun with buckshot, put up a target larger than the side of a barn, and shoot at it from point blank range. These shooters and their supporters point at all the holes in the target and sing the praises of their shooting skills.
The marksman quips that under such circumstances, it would be a harder trick to miss the target than to hit it.
One clueless boy assumes he’s talking about the shooting contest and claims that if he canavoid hitting the target then he is a better shooter than the marksman.
Spot on. But you missed out the bit where he
misses the target, but shoots self in foot. Everyone laughs.
Well, almost spot on. More like the marksman has challenged those who claim they can hit a target with their eyes shut. This, the marksman says, is impossible. Except the target they want to use is the side of a barn from a distance of 1 foot. Well, says the marksman, if you’re going to do it that way… etc, etc…
Since you are so petulantly harassing the hell out of Randi with your utterly unjustified insistence that you can claim his prize by paranormally detecting dry spots (note that the prize is only for demonstrating a paranormal power), you ARE implicitly claiming that dowsing works! You cannot detect a dry spot paranormally without being able to detect “wet spots” paranormally!
Your ridiculous claims represent at least as much dishonesty as Uri Geller’s, and infinitely more than Randi’s.
buck69, you and your self-deceiving fellow believers are utterly mistaken. No one has ever demonstrated the ability to dowse for anything under controlled conditions.
You only believe you can dowse, and your belief is completely unjustified and unsound.
In any case, it is up to you and/or your fellow self-dupes to present scientifically controlled, methodologically sound, overwhelming scientific evidence that establishes your (or another’s) paranormal claims (even though no such evidence exists). Only once you prove it works can you ask how it works!
While there’s good reason to believe you are telling us honestly what you believe, there is no reason at all to believe what you claim. Your (and your fellow believers) unjustified, undemonstrated, counter-evidentiary assertions are a consequence of well-known species-wide psychological reasoning and perceptual flaws. Science exists first and foremost to examine claims in such a way that those flaws are minimized to the fullest extent possible. And science says you are dead wrong.
I’m afraid there’s no reason to believe it works for any reason. It’s not the familiarity with the environment, it’s that dowsing always fails whenever it’s carefully examined or tested. As soon as good controls are put in place, the dowser fails completely, even on his home turf.
I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work; it’s entirely a psychological illusion.
If you had read the previous posts more carefully, you would have learned that the “dowser” brings the rods together all by himself. Only the tiniest muscle efforts are needed, and it need not be a conscious movement. All that’s happening is that your brain interprets your perceptions and your beliefs and forces the rods to come together (or whatever) only because you know that’s the right place. If you didn’t already know, such as if you were asked to find water beneath one of ten sealed boxes (all of the others being empty), you would fail miserably, just as every other dowser in the world who’s agreed to be properly tested has failed.
That’s utterly meaningless. If you dig just about anywhere, you will find water (eventually). A friend moved into a house with a pre-existing well that the previous owner proudly insisted was discovered by a water witch. The problem was that it was incredibly deep, as it needed to be to find any water at all. That was a big miss for dowsing! My friend had a new well sited by a professional geologist, and that well only needed to be about a quarter the depth. There is no such thing as a real, genuinely successful water-witch.
The point is that there are visible cues for finding pipes and water that people may not realize they are using. If you know in advance where things are, even if you are not contious of the fact, it’s easy to convince yourself that water witching works. If you remove the clues by placing people in an unfamiliar environment, they find themselves unable to pick up the clues and it won’t “work”.
I completely agree that dowsing never works, but people carrying dowsing rods can find pipes for example if they are able to use familiar clues in the environment.
Maybe not. There clearly is no rational explaination for it.
Water-witching isn’t something I spend a lot of time thinking about, one way or the other. It’s kinda’ fun to watch somebody do it and harmless, except for possibly continuing the spread of ignorance.
The guy that does it around here only charges $20, and it’s worth that to sit on the tailgate of your pickup truck, drink a beer and listen to the comments while everybody waits to see the stick get jerked downwards.
It is not necessary to listen to me. My posts have no substance. In fact, you’d miss out on nothing if you put your hands over your eyes and shouted “I don’t have to read Princhester’s posts because he’s just a name calling troll” at the top of your voice over and over.
Actually he probably just used experience. Some of us know Peter’s techniques well.
Some of them said that. Some of them said the opposite. As anyone can see who goes to the cites you have given and doesn’t take your word for it.
But you have only ears for those who agree with you.
The key point is, as Randi told you in his very first response, his whole “find me a dry spot” thing is a figure of speech, it’s rhetoric. You attempted to turn it into some sort of exact definition and Randi wouldn’t because it was a mere figure of speech in the first place.
Yes, because it was only ever a rhetorical challenge.
Actually this whole sad business tends to be a prevarication on what "underground water’ means.
Is this actually a quote? I can’t source it.
Of course, as you know, what Randi actually has said is that the notion of underground rivers that dowsers believe in is fictional. You like to try to segue that into a suggestion that Randi simply believes all underground rivers are fictional, but as you well know that is not what he has said or means. And as you know, the actual notion of underground rivers that dowsers have is indefensible, even by you.
Except that numerous people do apply, do agree with Randi on a protocol, and then fail. In other words your theory has everything going for it except any connection with reality.
