That happens if your entire message is inside a quote box. You must have gtot the tags wrong.
Your example has nothing to do with my post. Are you trying to say that because someone faked evidence about scientific experiments and got away with it for small bit of time, the same amount of time, effort and money should be spent on a claim for which no evidence(fake or otherwise) is presented?
Once again I ask you how much time, effort and money should be spent by others to investigate how I teleport from Portland to London and back, when I have yet to show that I can actually do it in the first place?
Czarcasm, you of all people should have got it. It was just sarcasm. Sorry if I antagonized you.
Not antagonized-just confused.
Czarcasm - while I cannot answer your questions directly, here’s some anecdotal evidence.
I worked as a Research Scientist early in my career (although I am an engineer by trade). In those days, Fuel cells were the “hot research item” with the “hydrogen economy” utopia. It was pointed out by many engineers (myself included) who had made hydrogen plants that the level of Carbon Monoxide and H2S needed by fuel cells catalysts were cost prohibitive and would drive out any benefits from switching to fuel cells.
They (prestigious universities and research centers) drowned away any such concerns, and year after year got public funding for millions of dollars to continue their research.
So in scientific research, like in human life, funding is many times decided by your affiliations and connections, and not by the quality of your research. Its the unfortunate truth.
Also -$$Sarcasm$$ - whatever scientific research money a scientist gets, almost 40% of it is taken away by the MBAs / Lawyers / … who run the research facility :D:D
That’s not anecdotal evidence-it’s just an unrelated anecdote. Are you trying to say that if it is o.k. to waste money in this area, it must be o.k. to waste money in any other area? If so, your example is a complete failure because fuel cells actually exist and we know how they work and that progress is being made every day on making them more and more feasible(despite whatever failures you may have been exposed to in your particular line of work). In contrast, when it comes to dowsing what we have are unverified claims that fall apart when tested, followed by various excuses, some of which also defy science as we know know it.
Look, if the question is: Can people who use dowsing rods find items at greater than chance probabilities?
And the answer is clearly yes. HeXen’s grizzled old foreman is a clear example. People use dowsing rods of various sorts in various ways, and they are able to find all sorts of stuff.
And the next question is: what explains this ability?
The simple obvious answer is that successful dowsers usually have a lot of experience with the sorts of things they’re trying to find, and they use conscious and perhaps unconscious clues to make an educated guess about the location of what they’re trying to find, and the sticks or rods or pendulums are moved by the dowser even if the dowser is not consciously trying to move the device.
If there is some other phenomenon going on then what exactly that phenomenon is, and how it works must be discovered.
Is there some outside physical force that moves the stick or rod or pendulum? Or is it the dowser himself who moves the object, consciously or unconsciously?
Well, when we do experiments where the dowser knows where the object is–we put the object under 1 of 10 buckets as the dowser watches and ask the dowser where the object is, the stick or rod works perfectly to find the object. But when the dowser doesn’t see suddenly the rod doesn’t move by itself and the effect is much weaker, and it’s very hard to distinguish between the results and chance.
And so it is very reasonable to conclude that the dowser is the one that creates the motion of the stick, rod, or pendulum, or whatever. And this makes sense because there are so many physical methods of dowsing that all work differently but give the same result. Why would this mysterious force make one dowser feel a wooden stick pull downward, another see a pair of metal rods cross, another see a pendulum rotate counterclockwise instead of clockwise? And why is it that if we mount the stick or rod or pendulum on a platform suddenly this movement doesn’t happen, it only happens when a human being is able to touch the detector?
So they hypothesis that the movement of the detection device comes from the human operator is very well supported, and any alternative explanation would have to account for all these facts. Of course this doesn’t mean that something interesting isn’t going on, it just means that the feat is taking place in the human mind, not some electrical or mechanical phenomenon that makes the stick move.
And of course, the fact that dowsers often disagree about how dowsing works doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, it’s often the case that people are able to do a task but not being able to explain how or why they do it. It just means that we shouldn’t accept the theories of a particular dowser about their own abilities at face value, since they often disagree with each other. And of course there is the possibility that different methods of dowsing work in different ways.
So now that we’ve established that the movement of the detection device comes from the human dowser, consciously or unconsciously, what next? How are they able to use their minds to detect these objects?
And of course, it turns out that lots of people are able to use their minds to figure out where things are, even if they sometimes can’t explain or don’t understand why.
So take HeXen’s grizzled foreman buddy. He can go out in a field, walk around for a bit, and tell his team to dig over here, and he’s very often correct. Is that a surprising result? As HeXen said, it’s always some grizzled old experienced guy who does this, not the sensitive youngster.
So the decades of experience of the grizzled old foreman at locating stuff in his professional life turns out to achieve results much better than chance. And this is surprising?
And if we took that same old dowser, and instead of letting him walk around the job site and look and listen and smell and touch the clues about where the hidden object might be located, if we took him to a featureless test area where none of those clues exist and ask him to find the hidden object, what happens? It turns out that in tests like this the ability of dowsers to find hidden objects at greater than chance probability drops tremendously, to the point where it doesn’t seem like the ability exists at all.
So what are we left with? The astounding ability of people with a lot of experience in a particular task to accomplish that task without much in the way of obvious clues, and without being able to explain how their minds were able to make that educated guess. The fact that they use an apparatus that doesn’t work without the input of the human mind and body just means that’s the method they use to reveal the output, rather than just saying, “I think it’s over here”.
We see this sort of thing happen with other sorts of “apparatus”, like drug sniffing dogs. Line up ten people, give them each a sealed package, and one contains cannabis and the others contain chamomile. Ask a drug agent with a dog to find the package. And it turns out that when the dog handler knows where the package is, the dog will alert to that package much more frequently. And so we realize that the dog isn’t just alerting based on smell, but also by getting cues from the handler. If the handler thinks he knows where something suspicious is, the dog will alert even if the dog doesn’t smell anything, because the dog isn’t in the business of finding drugs, the dog is in the business of pleasing the handler. Does that mean the dogs are useless? No, the dogs really do detect some packages by smell. But the dogs are also a tool for the subconscious mind of the handler.
And so with dowsing, if anything else extraordinary is going on, before we can even start to explain it we’d have to show that something else is, in fact, going on. People can find things by using various clues, even if the clues aren’t obvious. As we remove all the clues, the ability vanishes. Therefore, the ability is the ability to interpret the clues. Any other theory of dowsing will have to explain this mountain of evidence better than the theory that people are smart and can figure stuff out from clues they aren’t even aware of sometimes.
What clues? There are no clues to a 3 inch clay tile, 3 feet deep buried in 1865. As I mentioned, the entire landscape has changed since then making the original map useless.
That’s why I’m asking. I’m skeptical too but damn, you have to have a foundation for your skepticism otherwise your basing it on faith.
Actually, “a foundation” is not required for skepticism, other than logic, critical thinking capacity and evidence (notably the lack of).
Those who make dubious claims are the ones who have to supply a foundation for their beliefs.
Did he declare out loud that he was looking for that tile before he found it? If not, I think the first rule of showing off applies: Never get too specific, and if anything happens say you did it on purpose.
And this
is a dubious claim. No one outside of comic books makes claims that fantastic.
How should I know what clues there are? Ask your grizzled old foreman who’s been doing this job for decades. And maybe he won’t be able to tell you because even he doesn’t know. And the clues don’t have to be physical clues right in front, it could be just that he’s seen the survey maps hundreds of times and has some pretty good ideas what they were like. Or soil, or plants, or landforms, or god knows what.
Here’s the thing. If your guy had walked around the site and finally just said “I bet the marker is here”, and you dug it up just where he said, you’d think, “Damn, Joe really knows his stuff.” You’d be impressed, not because Joe did a magic trick, but because he was able to do something you and I could never do.
And I’ve known mechanics or computer guys who could poke around and say “I bet it’s such and such widget” and sure enough that’s exactly what it is. And they made that determination based on their years of familiarity with similar problems.
And of course, sometimes they say “I bet it’s the tachyon emitter array” and you check the tachyon emitter array and that’s not it, and then they say “Or could be the transwarp inducer” and you check that and sure enough it’s the transwarp inducer. So the educated guess isn’t right all the time, but it doesn’t have to be.
That happens when you quote something, but add nothing. vBulletin thinks your post is of zero length because it doesn’t count the quote text.
I’m sure you can think of a dozen easy workarounds.
First, I don’t really know anything about your example. In particular, I don’t know how close he really was to the tile, and I don’t know how many times in other fields he didn’t find the tile. Sadly, our human memories are not perfect and both of those things are going to be exaggerated in favor of a better story the more anyone remembers the incident. So, scientifically speaking, this isn’t a very good data point, and in my, and most peoples’, opinion, all the data where dowsing doesn’t work in controlled conditions carries a lot more weight. All that good data is a good foundation for skepticism.
Which isn’t to say he couldn’t have found the tile. We all know the tile wont’ run from a high point to another high point; in fact we’re pretty sure the tile will exit to the lowest point on the surrounding terrain. We’re also pretty sure the tile won’t run along the boundary road or into old-growth forest, and it will go more or less straight. So someone looking at the field probably has a decent idea about where it could be, even if the field has been plowed. I mean, I doubt the terrain can really be so different that the low spot is in a different place, or else the tile would have been disturbed as well. So it’s not completely incredible that at least once, he could have come somewhat close (or even by chance right on) the tile, given the existing clues he had just by looking around and being experienced.
Ouch. Head shot.
No. Skepticism must be the default state for any proposed hypothesis. You have to have a foundation (evidence) to accept the hypothesis as a working theory.
The foreman had a map of where the thing was buried. Which is more likely - that the foreman noticed a feature on the map that was still recognizable to him but not to you, or, um, whatever way you think dowsing rods “work”?
(By the way, how did the rods know to look for a tile, rather than water, or something else that may be buried??)
I figure being dead-on at least 95% of the time should make him the top man in his field in the entire world, because that is way beyond the abilities of anyone else in the field.
How many articles have been written about him, and how incredibly rich is he?
Can you explain, as I asked upthread, more about this tile. Why was there an old tile buried three feet deep that several farmers knew about? What was this thing? Why was it there? It just doesn’t make sense.
I’m with Princhester - why did anyone even know that there would be a three-inch clay tile buried in 1865 in that region? Was there a copy of an old newspaper headline?
AREA MAN BURIES SINGLE SMALL CLAY TILE IN UNUSED FIELD
Citizens outraged, call for swift action
I drill wells. I have no faith in dowsing. We pick the best technical spot and drill. We will get water. The questions at what depth, what flow rate and water quality.
Last month a customer decided they wanted to hire a dowser. They had plenty of property so we didn’t have much for limitations of where we could drill. They found a lady that charges $250 to do her thing. She claims 90% accuracy, I assume the number is made up. She marked a spot and claimed 18 gallons per minute at 500ft. We drilled in that spot and stopped drilling at 960ft, the well yielded 5gpm. most the flow came in around 750ft.
I’m particularly good at locating wells and underground lines. I don’t attribute my ability to supernatural phenomenon. I have a lot of experience and am very familiar with the work of past well drillers and excavators. Knowing the year the house was built, looking at the workmanship, and looking at the landscape I can often locate missing wells and give the approximate route of the offset piping.
One of the excavators I work with uses sticks to dowse line locations. He has a lot of experience himself. On the same property we’ll usually come to the same conclusion. I’ve told him he can lose the sticks. I guess they help him concentrate.