What an amazing piece of cognitive dissonance.
You said in post # 10
So, I tell you that I have applied for exactly that test, and you do a 180 degree turnabout and come out with
Hypocrisy, much?
Buddy, either stand behind your words in post #10 or admit that you were talking through your backside.
You are inelligable for a test which is a challenge to dowsers. He challenged dowsers to find a spot to dig, not a guy with a map. That the percentage of land that has water may be off is irrelevant to what he was saying, who he was challenging, and what he challenged.
I find it amusing that google ads are offering me dowsing rods.
Well you’re going to need them for when you accept the JREF challenge to dowse for dirt. Don’t think I’m going to let you out of this, buster.
I just love the way Randi fans always change what he said.
Peter Morris AND Musicat, (along with anyone else interested in the JREF organization, pro or con), TAKE IT TO ANOTHER THREAD, (preferably in the Pit).
This thread is intended to discuss dowsing, not James Randi. Stop the hijack and leave all the personal nonsense out of this thread.
[ /Moderating ]
That was the point of my saying that this wasn’t a test. It was triggered by a situation that I am certain arose spontainiously in the course of real life. (an assumption I’ll come back to)
This situation was never intended, by the participants, (except possibly one) to be a demonstration of dowsing. It was a mistake made by a couple of laborers, that turned into a very costly and embarrasing misadventure for the contractor.
None of the possible explainations I have come up with are as elaborate or as costly as the nearly house-sized hole that was excavated in the search for this item…a crew of 2-3 workers, including one heavy-equipment operator, and a rental for the backhoes. If it were a hoax, nothing so expensive and messy would have been needed to “sell” it.
Many, if not most illusions require that the performer carefully control the situation from the outset, limiting the angles of observation, planting stooges in the “audience”, supplying all the equipment used, etc.
If I wanted to simulate the whole thing as an illusion, the way to do it would be to bribe the laborers to SAY the thing was lost, and have them just hand it over to me. It would be expensive though, because they lost thier jobs over this, so they’d probably need to be disgruntled in the first place. They were part of a crew of three or four, so they’d need to be careful to make it appear genuine, wait for the other guys to go to lunch, etc.
So I do get that a key assumption is that the thing was ever really lost in the first place. If it was a hoax, then the hoaxsters did a damned fine job of convincing everyone of the validity of that assumption. The contractor spent a lot of time and money based on that assumption, and much of this was spent after J___ had “witched” the location. It also seriously strained his relationship with a lucrative customer…This was the same contractor who orgionally built our building, as well as a major addition.
If I wanted to “sell” the dowser, I’d have had him out there before the digging started. Which looking back, may be part of the eplaination. Once the arc was dug where the device should have been, J____ had a lot more information on where it wasn’t.
By letting it go on as long as it did, a hoaxster would have been risking a major law suit if found out. If one assumes it was a hoax, then I suppose that would be a reason the hoaxster never delivered a “gotcha”.
If the assumption of actual loss is valid, then pulling this off as a hoax becomes much more difficult.
I admit that it may have been possible for a professional magician to have set something up to take advantage of the situation after the item was lost. It doesn’t fit with what I knew of him though.
He wasn’t a prankster. He certainly was not a professional magician. I have known two amateur magicians, and in each case they enjoyed pulling slight-of-hand illusions in everyday situations…making a credit card dissapear as they hand it to a sales clerk, and
such. They also activly follow and discuss (though careful not to reveal secrets) public illusions conducted by professionals. They compare and contrast Copperfield to Siegfried & Roy, etc. That was not this guy.
I’ve got a pretty good understanding of how many magic tricks are done. You realize of course that you are operating on the assumption that this was a deliberate “trick”?
While there may be a profit motive for some, what I have seen and heard of dowsers leads me to think that for the most part, THEY actually believe it works. Like the new agers that buy crystals, energy vorticies, etc. most are victims of self delusion, not con artists.
IF dowsing works, my suspicion is that the explaination is psychological. Like Sherlock Holmes’ violin playing, I’ve often had the solution to vexing problems come to me when immersed in a totally unrelated activity. I’d say most if not all of what flys as “intuition” is actually subconcious deductive or inductive reasoning. IF there is anything to dowsing, my hunch is that the dowser focuses attention on his devining rod(s), and allows his mind to subconciously process subtle clues, and perhaps evidence that the concious mind would reject as too flimsy to bother with. What might that be? In the case of utility lines, pipes, etc. they are often buried using a trenching process. It is rare to get the earth packed tightly enough that it doesn’t settle over time. If one is focused on not intentionally causing a sensitive rod to rotate, thus not focusing one where one steps, that rod might well indicate when you step in 1/2" deep depression concealed by weeds, turf, whatever.
An easy way to differentiate and determine whether the phenomenon is internal and biologic versus external and force driven would be to build a dowsing robot and put it and human dowser through trials. The only drawback, is that the robot might be “conductive” and need special shielding or construction.
To be fair, I’ll entertain an idea if it has either theoretical support, or empirical support. So it’s OK by me for dowsing believers to look for theoretical reasons that dowsing might work.
But until they have either theoretical or empirical, it goes in the same category as homeopathy.
I think you mean ‘hypothetical’ - theories are what you get when your hypotheses are borne out by empirical support.
Anyway, it’s very kind of you to offer the benefit of the doubt like this, but where do you draw the line? Any number of unobserved phenomena could be asserted, along with plausible explanations of how they might work, if we’d ever actually observed them - how do you differentiate between worthy and worthless, except by testinjg *whether the asserted phenomenon even exists?