Water Witching

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
241

SiXSwordS said:

Okay, I read that paragraph, I guess I just interpreted things differently than you did. I suppose yes, theoretically, one could take known scientific principles and mask them/doctor them up as paranormal, claim you are using paranormal means, and if you fool the JREF testers, then you would win without paranormal means. I think the trick there is fooling the testers. Test situations and protocols should be set up to eliminate known scientific means. That is also why the testing protocol has two stages. It allows a chance to observe the testing and look for any previously unidentified means of cheating.

Yes, I agree that someone performing above statistical expectation that can be verified to be above chance and eliminate (to the best of ability) cheating is relevant. The problem to my mind is how to establish what level of performance is significant, assuming it’s not 100%.

I agree, you did not make a paranormal claim. I think glee was inaccurate in saying your (perhaps poorly stated) claim was the same as the paranormal ones. I think his intent was just to state that there is no evidence for either claim, but the comparison was too strongly worded and came off unfairly.

jeanjaz said:

I do not think viruses are susceptible to antibiotics. That’s why we can’t treat the flu with pennicillin.

It sucks that there may have been a cause to RA that was overlooked and even actively buried. However, without knowing any details myself, I can understand why conventional medicine would have had a hard time believing the stated claim. First, what evidence supported the existence of these microbes too small to be seen on then available microscopes? Second, you are saying he was using antibiotics on viruses, which is counter to understood medicine at the time and now. Doesn’t make sense. Like treating allergies with antibiotics - doesn’t do a damn bit of good, and has negative effects, both to the patient and long term to the usefulness of that antibiotic.

You are correct that scientists are humans, and susceptible to all the foibles that humans have. They have a tendency to be arrogant. That is not to say all scientists and doctors are so, but it is a common trait. Scientific methodology is not at fault. Scientific methodology is a tool for evaluating claims. Scientific methodology is open to anyone who wishes to use it, including those making unusual claims. Arrogant people will be arrogant, and use whatever tools are available to support their arrogance. That is the principle of being arrogant, not being scientific. It is unfortunate that there are closed minds. A good scientist will be able to accept new information that contradicts his expectations. But humans cling to their own beliefs and expectations, and fight to preserve them, so even scientists can be blinded. That’s why science works from a community and uses peer review. But ultimately, it is people at the root of doing science, so sometimes the results of science are delayed and stifled by the people doing it. As you say, sometimes other desires/interests get in the way.

That is a fun story that is a myth.

http://www.ideafinder.com/guest/archives/wow-duell.htm

glee said:

The problem is not establishing the pass/fail line, the problem is understanding the relevance of that pass/fail line.

Suppose he makes the claim he can get 50% right on coin flips. We can measure and determine whether or not he can be 50% successful, but does it mean anything if he makes 51% right on one test set? You have to establish why 96% successful “guessing” is significant. Otherwise, give me 100 pictures of dead celebrities and I’m sure I can get 100% right on guessing whether they are alive or dead. Uncertain is correct in the need to establish the statistical chance outcome is.

Musicat said:

PEAR didn’t “give up”. They have transferred their operations to other entities. Not because they failed - they think they successfully proved it exists and are trying to study more about the details.

http://www.psyleron.com/

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/future.html

Oslo Ostragoth said:

Stabilize your grip? But that’s what dowsing is, an unstable grip. It’s not like you grab solidly ahold of a bar of metal and it pulls your hand around like a dog on a leash (an untrained dog). The whole point of gripping the L-shaped rods loosely or lightly squeezing the Y rod is to create the instability point so the “forces” can freely manipulate it without you interfering, i.e. the slight motions of your body and hands can trigger the instability point and thus allow the rods to move “without your conscious effort”.

242

Assessing statistical significance is part of assessing ability. It is a critical part of a skeptical approach.

Really? Even if the number of coin tosses is huge (statistics tells us what counts as “huge”)? Even if we repeat the test over and over, and he reliably scores around 70%? We can’t, ever, no matter how many times he gets, say, 7,000 out of 10,000 right, conclude anything other than that he failed to demonstrate his ability? Just because he initially claimed 98% accuracy?

Now, somebody else claims to be able to predict coin tosses with 70% accuracy. That would be impressive, and big news if true. So we give him the same test. He gets 7,000 out of 10,000 right. So, according to your logic (if I understand it correctly), we conclude that he does have some ability (subject to the usual reservations about statistical significance and experimental flaws).

So, identical performance, but different conclusions about ability. In fact, even if the first guy performs better than the second guy, but worse than 98% (say, 80%), we conclude that the second guy has an ability but the first failed to demonstrate his ability.

It seems more reasonable to say that they have the same ability but the first guy overestimated his.

And what about somebody who makes no claim whatsoever? Does his 7,000 correct out of 10,000 mean nothing, or does it mean he has some ability? Is no claim better than a high claim? Or can he not be shown to have any ability, no matter what the outcome? Can chimpanzees or pigeons, who cannot make claims of accuracy but who can press buttons that we interpret as predictions, never, in principle, be shown to have such an ability? People with brain lesions that leave them with no concept of numbers?

I doubt that you’d apply this logic if the ability/task were something ordinary and plausible, rather than something paranormal. If we were talking about people’s scores on a true/false test, or their ability to distinguish Coke from Pepsi in blind tastes tests, or their ability to judge which of two people is the older, you wouldn’t be putting this weight on what people claim. In fact we’d usually do the tests without anybody making any claim. That’s certainly what we would do with a true/false test in a class. We don’t conclude that the guy who boasted he could get 98% right, but only scored 70%, hasn’t demonstrated any knowledge.

Certainly in a situation like the million dollar challenge there must be prior agreement as to what counts as a “win”, so as to determine unambiguously whether the contestant gets the million dollars or not. That doesn’t mean that the person who fails to “win” has necessarily not demonstrated any ability. Indeed, there will usually be a huge disparity between what these clowns claim they can do and what could be achieved by luck with non-minute probability, so that there’s plenty of room for results that would fail the agreed-upon test but would still be evidence of something.

Um, yeah, at least just as much as a guy who claimed he could get 70% right and scored 70%, or a guy who made no claim at all.

It might be funny to call it “ability”, but it’s big news. We have to be careful if we’re talking about borderline statistical significance (decide in advance whether to do a one- or two-tailed test), but we should be able to see an effect this big easily. If he can do it with red/black on the roulette wheel, I’m taking him to Vegas (of course I’ll have to bet on the opposite of what he predicts).

Yeah, but so what? They’ve demonstrated something less dramatic but nonetheless important. If you fail to demonstrate your claim that your new drug can cure 98% of AIDS patients, but 7,000 out of 10,000 are cured (modulo placebo controls, etc.), I’m still interested.

I think you’re not distinguishing between statistical significance and effect size (the latter of which has something to do with “significance” in an entirely different sense). If you can reformulate your question with this distinction in mind, I’ll attempt an answer.

243

Yeah. I said I didn’t believe the claim for a minute. Why did you omit that from what you quoted?

I discussed those sorts of concerns in my post, along with why they seemed to have no bearing on what we were discussing. You haven’t addressed any of what I said about this silly paranormal-chasing endeavor having nothing to do with anything I claimed, despite your attempt to connect them back in #203.

244

Musicat & Glee

I wasn’t trying to prove or disprove that dowsing rods actually work. I was giving background information. So I hope you had fun making stupid remarks that were totally irrelevant, Glee.
Irishman:

I never said that they were viruses, I said they were smaller than viruses (or I meant that if I didn’t actually say it, but I know I said something to that effect). They have their own name that I can’t remember right off. Something like macrovirae but I don’t remember. They can’t be treated with penicillin type antibiotics but they can be treated with 2 other kinds of ‘antibiotic type drugs.’ I took a low dose Minocycline every other day although the original protocol outlines a period of time at the beginning where you take the antibiotic IV. I wasn’t able to take it IV because it blew my veins after the first few times - I have taken prednisone for nearly 40 years and my tissues deteriorate very easily. There is a stage in the lifecycle of the ‘germ’ (WHATEVER it is called) where it is susceptible to the minocycline, that is why you take it for 3-5 years. You are supposed to take it steady for 3 years, then you can stop if a certain blood test shows no activity. If there are still any ‘germs’ left, you restart the treatment when they come out of their dormant stage.

Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Check around on the internet, there are several websites relating to this treatment. The treatment has been proven in published clinical studies, but that is my point, the medical community still won’t accept it because of prejudices drilled into them by the pharmaceutical companies and the AMA. Minocycline is no longer a proprietary drug so no one gets rich off of it.

By your definition of skeptic, then I am also one. But I don’t run other people down just because they don’t believe the same as I do. For instance Glee runs everyone down with sarcasm and insults. He obviously has never studied debate or maybe the only way he can prove his points is by making insulting remarks that deliberately misunderstand what was said. The whole discussion about the photographs was an interesting and civil one with few exceptions. A delight to follow with the exception of Glee’s remarks and some of Musicats. They added nothing to the discussion and were designed to be inflammatory and degrading.

I apologize for using an example to illustrate my point that was a myth that I didn’t take the time to check out. However, my point still remains valid. I have run into that attitude many times. I taught computer literacy to an older generation in Boeing before I retired and ran into comments like, “I use it for a paperweight, that’s all it’s good for,” and other comments that showed their unwillingness to have an open mind and be teachable on something new and difficult for them to understand.

As far as scientists go, all you have to do is look at the ‘food fads’ on which ‘trained scientists’ have boomeranged. Like eggs that, a few years ago, raised your cholestrol, now they know that the whites and yolks eaten together actually lower your bad cholestrol. I saw parents who nearly erradicated ‘cholestrol’ from their kids’ diets and ended up with mentally deficient kids because 90% of your brain is made up of cholestrol and the cholestrol molecule is the basis (when put with a variety of enzymes) for all the different hormones, especially those needed by developing children. Some scientists look at one piece of the elephant and come up with a mandate without waiting to see how it fits in with the rest of the elephant.
CurtC:

I had a response for you but now I can’t remember what it was - sorry.
I guess the point of my post was that there isn’t enough information yet for anyone to make an adamant stand one way or another. We don’t know enough about what is going on to even make a valid test so I misdoubt the tests everyone keeps quoting. I guess by that standard, I am more of a skeptic than any of you. In the lack of information, anyone’s guess is just as good as anyone else’s guess, and anecdotal evidence is a step up from mere guessing.

The AMA and pharmaceutical companies test the heck out of a new drug, but if a double blind clinical study comes up with a ridiculously low success rate they will still stamp it a success. (I don’t remember what it was, but I remember being VERY surprised that it was below 50%, I think it was in the 30’s.) It is still considered a safe drug if only a small percentage react and die from it. I wouldn’t want to be one of those dead in a successful study. And then despite all these tests, it will work on some people and not on others, and doctors have NO IDEA why that is. The point being that we STILL know such a small percentage of how our bodies and our evironment work that we are constantly guessing even when we do double blind clinical studies and prove something (we just aren’t sure what we proved exactly.)

So I guess what I’m saying is — it is the height of foolishness to adamantly throw something out and ridicule those who still consider it a possibility – no one is that smart and no test we can come up with is that conclusive.
On top of that, this is an informal discussion. Most of us are writing off the cuff, not making a scientific thesis. Several of you needled the way someone said something as inaccurate, when, if you’d taken a little time to look at the context you would have seen that they only mistated it. It is very tedious to have to re-state something in exact terms for someone who refuses to look at the meaning of what was said, not just the terminology. Like I said, we all aren’t writing formal theses here after all, right? I am the worst at that sort of thing, forgetting terminology or mistating it, like saying “tiny viruses” when I didn’t mean they were viruses at all, like I had said earlier, they are like viruses only much smaller and require more powerful microscopes to see them and then it is hard to catch sight of them because of their size compared to a droplet of blood. Bacteria and viruses don’t have that problem.

One comment on the Photograph test:

It looks like you all were testing the psychic ability of Pramanujan, and the nature of the test makes it so that you can’t test dowsing rods in that manner. Pramanujan’s ‘weapon of choice’ just happened to be a type of dowsing rod, but he wasn’t using them like dowsing rods. Or am I wrong here?

245

Sure would like to see a cite for that.

Dowsing proponents have made claims from the ridiculous to the sublime, from being able to find lost dogs to dowsing for a well halfway around the world using only a crude map to determining the sex of an unborn child. Pramanujan’s claim to be able to use dowsing (he said he was using the rod, not just guessing) to determine whether someone is alive or dead just from a photo isn’t all that extreme. Since no good proof of any of these claims has ever been supplied, and some people will believe any claim you make, the field is open to just about anything you want to dream up.

246

Yes, but statistical significance on its own is not enough. (Apologies if I’m not making myself clear.)
If a computer program ‘guesses’ 70% on coin tosses, are you going to say it has psychic powers?

The point of testing claims is to test claims. If you also say afterwards that something else happened, based on statistical significance, then you run the risk of data mining.

If someone did score 70% repeatedly, I would agree there was something interesting going on. But it certainly wouldn’t be evidence of a 98% ability.

What would you think if someone claimed 98%, but scored 30% on a test?
What would you think if someone claimed 98%, scored 70% on the first test, then 30% on a second test?
What would you think if someone claimed 98%, but scored 51% on a test?

247

I’m sorry if I upset you. However I certainly don’t agree you were giving background information.

You said dowsing was ‘proven’.
It has never passed any scientific test.
There has been a million dollar reward for the first dowser to show their skill. Not only has nobody ever suceeded, but almost all dowers now refuse to be tested.

You say that ‘My relatives say my mom would be able to “witch wells” …, but she’s never tried it and doesn’t have any need to.’
Given she would be the first person in history to show this ability, plus she would become a millionaire overnight, why doesn’t she try it?

My point about levitation was that it’s easy to make a claim.
Do you agree I can levitate?
If I offer to teach you (my standard fee is $25,000), would you like to learn?
What would convince you I can levitate?
Would you want to test me?

Pramanujan says he can use dowsing rods to do this. Therefore we can test his claim.
Any paranormal claim is equally ‘valid’ - it just needs testing.

248

No, but I’d very much like to see such a program.

249

Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I meant if a computer program did it once.

250

Yes, there’s so much more to life.

As I prepared a response I realized that it’s utterly irrelevant to what we’re discussing. It wouldn’t change for either of us if we replaced 70% with 98%, and it has nothing to do with whether anybody had claimed 98% or 70% or anything else.

Right, scoring 70% wouldn’t be evidence of 98% ability. I think we agreed about that from the start.

It’s good to test things, especially extraordinary claims, repeatedly. Whether we’ve done enough trials for reasonable confidence that the result is not due to chance depends on–dare I speak the words?–statistical significance. It doesn’t depend on the success rate that he claimed. We could, in fact, test him if he made no claim.

I’m not sure what we’re arguing about anymore. Some difficulties may arise because we’re talking about testing for things that we both believe to be impossible. So let’s try it with something plausible: identifying records just by looking at them, with the labels covered.

Person A claims that he can do this with 98% accuracy (I imagine we have a pool of, say, 100 records). We go through 10,000 careful trials. He gets 7,000 right.

Your take, paraphrasing your earlier words, would apparently be “All you can say about a 98%-accurate record-identifier who scores 70% is that he failed to demonstrate his ability.” My take would be that he demonstrated the ability to identify records with about a 70% success rate. This counts as an ability because it is way better than chance. Formally we would have to check the, um, statistical significance, but 7,000 out of 10,000 would be off the charts. He also over-estimated his ability, but that doesn’t nullify the ability that he actually has.

Person B claims that he can identify records with 60% accuracy. In 10,000 trials, he gets 6,000 correct.

You would conclude that he has demonstrated his ability, unlike person A, since he did what he said he could. I would conclude that he indeed demonstrated an ability, but less of an ability than person A did. All the evidence suggests that person A is better at record identification than person B.

Now suppose that we are going on a mission in which our lives depend on record identification. We can bring one or the other of these people along to help. I would pick person A, without question. And you would pick…? Person B, because he, unlike person A, has demonstrated an ability for record identification?

Perhaps you really believe that person B has demonstrated an ability but person A has not, despite the fact that A had more successes. Perhaps, in accord with this, you would pick person B for the mission. How you could hold this position is beyond me.

I suppose you might think that neither has demonstrated an ability because 60% or 70% is too low for this (or for coin-toss-prediction). I don’t think you think this, or that it is defensible. But even if you do think this, it has nothing to do with what anybody claimed he could do.

Or maybe you think, yes, person A has demonstrated an ability, and a greater ability than B, and of course we would pick him for our mission (all subject, of course, to the usual concerns about experimental design and integrity, but these apply equally well to A and B). And the same would apply to predicting coin tosses. And the same would apply, with 98% and 70% replaced by appropriate numbers, to determining whether people in photographs are dead or alive by dowsing. If you believe this then we are in agreement, and this whole discussion has been for naught (perhaps due to a miscommunication).

So either you hold a view that I find bizarre and incomprehensible, despite extensive discussion, or we are in agreement. Either way, it seems pointless to continue, so I guess this is my last word on the subject.

251

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You didn’t upset me, I was making the point that you weren’t have an intelligent discussion, you were running down the opposition. There is a difference.
So, are you claiming psychic ability now? I said I was giving background information and I meant it. I was showing what I had been exposed to throughout my childhood and into adulthood that might predispose me to one opinion or another. I have a college degree in business. My hobbies are physics, linguistics, and needlework. I am a single Mom with a 10-year old daughter. Is that more like what you think of as background information?
Your reaction to this discussion is frequently at an emotional level. It would be interesting to know your ‘background’ and what opinions you might have been predisposed to except for…???

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I don’t believe I would have said it was proven because I don’t believe it HAS been proven. You must be taking that thought out of context.

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Firstly, I said MY RELATIVES say…, I nor my mom have no idea if she can - we joke about it saying we ought to test it out sometime.
Secondly, first person in history <b><i>that we know of</i></b>…
Thirdly, this may come hard for you to comprehend, but not everyone’s first priority is to become a millionaire, especially in that way. Being righ is highly overrated - I have nothing against being rich, but I would much rather be happy and content than rich. Currently, I am probably lower middle class, but most of my relatives are very wealthy. They earned it by owning a business 2 generations ago and then choosing wise investments since then.

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Firstly, If you told me you could levitate I wouldn’t believe nor disbelieve you but I probably wouldn’t tell you what I truly thought or make fun of you. Depending on your personality, I would think the likelihood of you being able to levitate highly doubtful, however, I would believe that either you believed you could or that you were trying to make a fool out of me.
Hmmm, an offer to learn to levitate… in that case I would need to see you levitate in several situations of my choosing - I don’t know that I would need a double-blind study or whatever, but I would want to witness this ability if it was going to cost me something to not know for sure. Levitating would be a handy ability, especially for me - I’m an older lady with bilateral aka amputations so I’m stuck in a wheelchair - but I wouldn’t pay $25,000 whether you convinced me or not.

The thing is that to me it totally depends on the person who is making a claim. If they are egocentric and puffed up trying to make themselves out as superior or trying to get something from me in the way of money - I would have no use for even testing their ability - let them show off to someone else. If it is someone who truly believes they have the ability and attempts to do honest things with the ability, then it costs me nothing to believe that they believe it and if someone asked my opinion, I would say I honestly don’t know but I have/haven’t seen them do it. See, to me it just depends on how they treat other people.

What is you motivation for ridiculing people who believe such things? Are you afraid they are going to make a fool out of you or fleece you? What does it cost you to give them space to believe what they want? YOU don’t have to believe it just because they do.

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The point I was making is that everyone is making the assumption that the use of dowsing rods is ‘paranormal’ when I don’t make that initial assumption. What Pramanujan does I would consider paranormal although he claims anyone can do it and that all he’s doing is sensing energy fields.

What I think is IF dowsing rods were a legitimate tool, it would be using some band of energy not yet discovered, not magic, paranormal abilities, or mysticism.

Who is to say that the energy spectrum is only two dimensional or that there are frequencies at either end that even our most sensitive instruments can’t pick up or that they are looking in the wrong place for the energy. Just think, Jules Vernes’ novels were mere impossible fantasies when he wrote them in what, the 1700’s or 1800’s? But most of what seemed fantastic then is possible now. So have we now reached the end of new discoveries? What would happen if we figured out how to tap into the other 9/10ths of our brains that we don’t use?

And your responses only prove my point further. In 10/2005, I was dead for 20 minutes without the benefit of CPR or any form of life support for that period. (Thus my amputations) It is a literal miracle that I can think and reason, and even type at all, but I do have trouble expressing my thoughts, to a degree, and remembering terminology and little details. I use a lot of words and illustrations to show what I seem unable to express concisely but I find very few people take the time to really see what I am saying - they frequently do like the News does - take little pieces out of your words and hammer you with them. Many people don’t have the reading skills or the patience to give the attention to other people’s opinions and do them justice. So, Glee, you can parse and pick at my words and throw them back at me, but it just shows you really aren’t interested in other people’s thoughts except to ridicule them.

Like I said, I enjoyed the experiment and the teamwork shown in working it out and discussing the results. You brought up some good counterpoints, but even I could understand some of the responses that you seemed to refuse to understand - unless you really could not pick up on what they had meant But then you didn’t need to answer them back with a tone that seemed to be meant to ridicule and mock.

252

How do you feel about long walks on the beach?

253

I’d like some clarification on this point. (Though not necessarily from Uncertain.)

As I (mis-?)understand it, statistical importance at this point looks at the extremity of the success rate. In this case we’d look not only at the chance that one would score 70%, but the chance that one would score between 30% and 70%.

If there were a computer program that consistently guessed at a 30% rate, that might indicate significance too.

IANAStatistician, so I may be way off on this. However, I don’t think the idea is that far removed from the idea of asking someone to point out a spot where one could dig a well and expect no water.

254

I’m glad I didn’t upset you and I thought I was having an intelligent discussion.
My point was that giving anecdotes as proof of something that had never been demonstrated (despite claims stretching back hundreds of years) was not worthwhile evidence.

I certainly took issue with your statement that

Here you have the absolute antithesis of scientific proof. Someone says someone else could do something paranormal if they wanted to.
Our motto here is ‘fighting ignorance’. I’m sorry, but I find the above statement the opposite of what we stand for here.

That is pleasant stuff. :slight_smile:
But you claimed your backgound information was helping the discussion on whether dowsing existed.
If your hobby is physics, then why don’t you understand about scientific testing and scientific proof?

I may have put my point too firmly on this issue. This is because I have been hearing unsupported claims of dowsing for decades.
When challenged for scientific proof, the dowser immediately declines.
When offered $1,000,000 for a morning’s work, the dowser uses one of the following:

  • it’s too complicated to apply
  • I haven’t got the time
  • I don’t believe he has the money
  • I know he has the money, but he won’t hand it over
  • I don’t need the money
  • my powers don’t work if I get paid
  • my powers don’t work if anyone is watching
  • my powers don’t work when they are tested

I note that your mother is not even going to try a dowsing test because ‘being rich is highly overrated’. :rolleyes:

As for my background, I’m an international chess player, computer programmer and teacher.
I believe in the scientific method.
I believe in gravity, evolution and that there is no proof for dowsing.
I believe it’s likely there are aliens, but not that they have visited Earth.

From your post 150 in this thread (bolding mine):

Given that people have been trying to levitate for centuries, that we understand gravity and that magicians make a good living out of fooling people over levitation, why wouldn’t you be suspicious?
What would your reaction be if I told you that my powers don’t work when they are tested?
This of course is exactly what dowsers do.

My motive is to stop frauds, charlatans and spreading unsubstatiated rumours, esp[ecially where fraud is involved.
There are enough Nigerian 'millionaires, boiler rooms selling fake shares and expensive psychics without adding fuel to the fire.

The scientific term for ‘dowsing’ and ‘sensing energy fields’ is paranormal. This is because it has never been demonstrated. There is no reason to believe in it without evidence.

The only way I can judge you is on the words you choose and type on this message board.
I would be delighted if someone came up with proof of a paranormal ability. What frustrates me is people who claim something miraculous exists, then instantly back away from proving it.

255

Sorry this is late, but I hereby confirm that the answers given by RJKUgly in post 212 were sent to me in advance of the test (as agreed) and are all as stated.

256

Thanks glee.

257

jeanjaz said:

Sorry, I can only go by what you say, not what you meant but didn’t say. I tried google searching on “micro virus”, but it took some doing because computer virus stuff got in the way. Eventually I uncovered “viroids” and of course prions. Only problems are that viriods are plant viruses without the protein coat, and prions are abnormally folded protein agents that only affect neural tissue and are untreatable. So I’m puzzled how either apply to your case.

Of course, I didn’t say otherwise, that’s why I asked about it. But if I haven’t heard of it then it has a lower likelihood of being well-known by laypeople.

This statement bugs me. I understand the issues related to the pharmeceutical companies pushing new drugs they hold patents on. I understand concerns over undo influence over the medical establishment. But the medical community is not some monolithic entity, it is a collection of individual doctors. And medicine is about finding what works, not making pharmeceutical companies happy. Surely if there were something to it someone would be pursuing it. Look at the case of ulcers. They were thought to be stress induced and other things until someone discovered an infectious cause, and then collected the scientific evidence to prove the case. It is now accepted in the medical community, because he did the work to prove it. There was resistence to the idea, because it went counter to some understood processes, but he won out by the evidence.

Nonsense. They make very strong claims about what they can do. It doesn’t matter the underlying physics, they say they can do it. We are asking them to demonstrate under controlled conditions, controls they agree won’t prevent them. How hard is that?

Say I claim to be able to juggle 3 balls for 10 minutes straight without dropping them. You hand me 3 balls and hold a stopwatch. Now if you hand me 4 balls or tell me I have to wear a blindfold, those aren’t part of my original claim. But 3 balls is, and a stopwatch doesn’t interfere in any way with whatever it is I am doing with the balls, it just validates the time element. So I try to juggle, but consistently drop after a few seconds, never making more than 15 - 20 seconds. Guess what? I failed, and probably cannot do what I claimed. I certainly have not demonstrated that I can, and nobody should feel the need to believe I can. That doesn’t mean juggling is impossible, but it certainly means I am making unjustifiable claims.

It’s the same way with dowsing. Dowsers say they can do something, very well (like 100% effective, or 98% with the picture test). That is pretty impressive results, so it should be fairly simple to have them show us. Only problem is that any time the dowsers are put to tests under controlled observing conditions, they fail. That strongly indicates that what they think they are doing is something very different from what they are actually doing.

Furthermore, we have applied standard known physics to what they are doing, and have a pretty good idea what it is that makes it seem to work. So not only does what they claim to do run counter to any known physics (i.e. conflict with known physics, not just remain unexplained), but we have known physics that can account for their results. That is two ways why we can be fairly sure we know the dowsers are wrong.

Welcome to the internet. :wink: Seriously, we are communicating through a written forum, all we have is the words we use and the way we use them. Interpreting a person’s intent is notoriously difficult without verbal and visual cues. Furthermore, while you think this is an informal forum, it is one that attempts to be accurate. Our site motto is “Fighting Ignorance”. That means that sometimes precision is required for accuracy in the name of fighting ignorance. Certainly, some people need to be a bit more open to grasping what is meant, but really that is the essence of communication - making what you intend understood by the other person.

We have not tried to characterize what the effect is. Maybe it is some psychic ability that pramanujan accesses with his rods, maybe it is some auric field that the pictures put out that he reads with the rods. He seems to say that it is the latter, that he is irrelevant and it is the rods and the pictures interacting. But for purposes of the test, we do not need to know that. We just need him to demonstrate that the rods move the way he says when the pictures are present. What we are attempting to do is provide a set of control pictures that he can use to prove the test set up will not prevent the effect - whatever the effect is. Then we run the actual test where he doesn’t know the answers but everything else is identical. If the effect is external to him (whether that is the pictures affecting the rods or the pictures giving him a psychic connection), then it shouldn’t matter, it should work even if he doesn’t know the right answer. Indeed, that is his claim, that it works even if he doesn’t know the right answer. So that is the test.

glee said:

First, I would need to know the likelihood of chance performance. Not only “50%”, but also how tight that 50% is. In other words, you have the chance expectation, but you also have the test sensitivity. If the test is 3 pictures, and he gets 1 right and 2 wrong, he hits 33%. The next run of 3 he gets 2 right and 1 wrong, for 66% accuracy. 33% is below 50% and 66% is above 50, but neither is statistically relevant because the sample size is too small. But if he runs 1000 pictures at 50% chance expectation and gets 33%, then something is up. What that something is would need further study.

What about he runs a sample of 100 and scores 70%, then runs a sample of 100 and scores 30%? Both are significant deviations from 50%, but with the reverse in polarity, he isn’t succeeding above chance. I would wonder if there was something else going on - he’s reading cues in the pictures, the effect isn’t what he thinks it is so the control methods actually do affect his ability but he doesn’t realize it, someone is giving him the answers and we fooled that person - something.
**glee ** said:

Consistently? Then yes, I just might call it “psychic powers”. Or I would probably want to study that computer program very closely to find out what it is doing and why it gets correct answers. But why can’t a computer program be psychic if a person can? We haven’t established what psychic powers are? How can we say they can’t be had by computers when we don’t know what they are?
jeanjaz said:

You may have been giving what you thought was background on your history and family, but in the process you made several statements intending to support dowsing that were of a dubious nature. So people took issue with those statements.

What you do with the money isn’t the point. If you don’t want to be a millionaire, donate it to your favorite charity. Throw it out a window for the homeless. That’s not the point. The point is that a million dollars is sitting there and all a person needs to do to claim it is do something they do every day, all the time. Why is it suddenly a big deal to do it one more time? Why is the easy million not appealing? It would be one thing if we were asking for the person to amputate a limb or fire himself out of a cannon across the Grand Canyon or be an expert juggler when all they’ve claimed is that they have tried juggling once. But what if all we wanted was the person to demonstrate they could drive to work? Take out the garbage? Flush the commode? Wouldn’t you think something was silly about declining a million dollars for flushing the commode? (Okay, maybe there’s something really bad in that commode. :smiley: ) “I play solitaire.” “Okay, play a game of solitaire and I’ll pay you a million dollars.” “Nah, I’m not in the mood.”

It’s considered paranormal because it is outside the bounds of established science. 300 years ago if we had showed someone a box you could talk into in one room and your voice would come out in another, it would have been paranormal. Now it is a telephone. It’s not paranormal because it’s “mystical”, it’s paranormal because it is inconsistent with what we currently know about physics.

If someone were to consistently demonstrate the ability to dowse, then we would begin an extensive investigation of what dowsing is, how it works, whether it relies on some energy field that can’t be seen, etc. We would develop new tools and explore it and make devices to use it. But so far, no one can show that dowsing is anything other than subtle unconscious movements making highly unstable systems move.

Oops, you’re the victim of another one of those urban legends. There is no mystical 9/10ths of our brain that we don’t use. Brain scans show all of the brain being used (for most people, anyway - brain damage doesn’t count). This is a myth generated a century ago by a misquote.
SiXSwordS said:

Yes, not only chance performance, but test sensitivity. Statisticians will talk about standard deviations and such, but that is what it is about. If I have a sample size of 5, then any one answer has a large effect on the final value. 3 right and 2 wrong is 60% success, but it’s not statistically significant because one error would change the number to 40% success. 1 data point causing a 20% swing across the chance performance line isn’t significant.

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Okay, I looked them up and they are called mycoplasmas. You can find a description of them and how they cause RA and how they can be treated here:
http://www.roadback.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=education.display&display_id=101

They are similar, the same TYPE of microorganism to what causes some types of cancer and they also have been related to HIVpositive patients.

I am sorry to say, Irishman, that you are a little naive when it comes to the medical community and I don’t mean that as a putdown either. I have dealt with the medical community for over 40 years and have had ongoing relationships with my various docs, which at any one time I have 3 - 5 regular and 2 or 3 that I see on occasion. The Rx companies monitor what Rx each doctor prescribes. They are rewarded if they prescribe what they are pushing, and can even get blackballed if they persistently don’t. I have had several docs tell me they can’t do a certain thing I’ve asked because they’ll get in trouble with the Rx company. I had one doc say I could take red yeast rice and fish oil capsules in place of cholestrol and blood pressure medicine, but I didn’t hear it from him because he could get in trouble. Much of the ongoing education doctors receive is from attending Rx sponsored events. Doctors who are ‘rewarded’ get discounts to these events, and even free tickets, in Hawaii and other fancy, luxurious places. This is NOT hearsay. I have heard it from many of my doctors, and one who used to work for one of the Rx companies and quit because of the unethical practices there, (withholding cures) then went into private practice, then was harrassed with lawsuits and all sorts of stuff because he wouldn’t prescribe what he considered dangerous Rx but would give nutrients and supplements that did the same thing without side-effects. Just reading what Dr. Thomas McPherson Brown went through when he was the head of the Rheumatology subcommittee illustrates that the medical community really is a huge monolith of egos and careers and stodgy old men set in their ways and not wanting to look like fools because they backed something that has been found to be wrong. I have had two Rheumatologists who went into research and that discription could fit both of them even tho one was female. :slight_smile: Anyway, I prefer to see them like that than moneygrubbing, willing to kill millions of people for a payoff from the Rx company. It sure looks like a lot of politicians are in the latter category.

Well, let me see if I can word this in such a way that you won’t chop it up and spit it out just because I can’t get my terminology exactly just so.

One possibility that I picture COULD be the scenario (I am NOT saying it is, btw)
True: The earth does have large magnetic fields. They have been mapped and are known to affect the weather patterns. You learn about these in meteorology (and when you study Tessla’s theories as well). True: When you study homing pigeons and other migratory birds and animals you find they have certain cells with magnetic material in them that make them act like a compass. These cells tell a bird where they are because they can sense with them the earth’s magnetic fields.
So, let’s say that some people have it in their genetic makeup to be born with these sorts of cells that are able to sense magnetic fields or static electricity fields (is that what gauss meters sense?). Who knows maybe we all have these cells, but like what biofeedback machines do for us, we don’t know how to tap into the information these cells give us. I don’t know if you are familiar with biofeedback machines, but it is a way to give an audible or visible cue whenever a person does a certain thing with their body they wouldn’t normally be able to sense and control.
So lets say, that given certain situations, a person has found a way to tap into this information, and like Dumbo the elephant, they need a talisman or an instrument to help them since the sensing of it is so obscure, difficult to find and control. This person doesn’t really understand why s/he can do this or why s/he needs the talisman in order to do it, they just know that they can. Suppose, like a golfer or bridge player, they need quiet and positive energy to concentrate in order to tap into this information. Almost anyone will have trouble focusing when put on the spot. Now I AM NOT SAYING THIS IS TRUE OR EVEN POSSIBLE. All I did was find dynamics that I already know exist and pasted them together into something that looks relatively plausible to me.

So, just for arguments sake and to illustrate the point I want to make, lets assume this is exactly what is going on behind the scenes but, like we have here, we don’t know it, it hasn’t been hypothesized, let alone proven. But you take a person that has this tentative access to this innate ability and compare it to measuring a person juggling balls. You DO know the physics going on with a person juggling balls, you know the variables - the person’s talent, physical capabilities, their hand-to-eye coordination, the person’s own true understanding of what makes him able to juggle, and his ability to concentrate no matter his surroundings.

This is what I was trying to say in an earlier post. Since it goes against KNOWN physics, then it either is a bunch of hokiness, or it is based on UNKNOWN physics or an unusual combo of KNOWN physics. IF it is true (not necessarily my make-believe scenario above), and it is based on UNKNOWN physics, then how do we know what conditions would affect the tests? How do we know what would make it fail or not? How do we know what the variables are?

So, what I have been saying ever since I entered into this discussion, is there hasn’t been enough proof to say this ability is real, but there also hasn’t been enough proof to say it isn’t real - to my satisfaction anyway.

I’ve heard a lot of you all’s explanations and they are very reasonable and in the situations described I’ve no doubt those dynamics were at work. They don’t explain the situations I’ve seen though. I’m not saying those were legitimate - I don’t know if they were or not - but I’m saying those explanations don’t work in these situations. I don’t know how I would discount them except by pure luck.

Unfortunately, I am a pictorial talker. I used to think I was analytical and able to express myself in scientific terms, but, alas, that is not the case. So, I am operating under a handicap talking to all of you on here in the first place. (It would be interesting to know what percentage on here is male.) So, instead of expressing myself in precise & accurate verbage, I paint word pictures and give illustrations. You’ve heard that saying about a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, I’m the thousand words person (if you haven’t noticed).
Another very unfortunate thing is that concise, analytical types like most of you, have very little patience or room in your world for pictorial types like me. This has been a real handicap in my career with my business degree, let me tell you. I have managed by knowing my business very well and learning the analytical language and the catch phrases typically used in the businesses where I’ve been employed. I am fairly well-read, but I remember what I’ve read in pictures, making it very difficult to communicate because the terminology just doesn’t stick easily to pictures.
SO, I know that you all are going to misunderstand me, but I am not stupid nor ignorant despite my inability to speak your language and even though it isn’t all that hard to look at my word illustrations and see what I am trying to say, I’ve swallowed some pretty hefty put-downs in order to try to communicate what I think is important. That is why I was jumping on Glee, whose last response was very interesting and wonderfully honoring despite our differences (I worked on a response to him for 2 hours and then lost it all with a pc glitch - enough to make a person swear - not that I did mind you.) Even tho my ego has taken a real battering in this discussion, I think it is good for me to at least try to communicate with all of you even tho I am likely older than most of you and probably seen a lot more and been through a whole lot more. I am NOT saying I KNOW more, BTW.

I agree with you there. For the purposes of the experiment with Pramanujan, knowing whether it is psychic or physical is irrelevant - you were testing Pramanujan’s skill, regardless of his claim that anyone could do it. That would be a separate test I would think.

But from what I have seen of the use of dowsing rods, I don’t see how Pramanujan’s use could be a physical thing. But maybe I am guilty of the same closed-mindedness of which I have accused all of you. Discounting a thing just because I can’t imagine how it could work with what I know of physics and other known biological phenomenon.

Well, it is really sad when even the forum program says you are too verbose. :frowning: I could get a complex if I didn’t already have one. So, I’ll break off here and put the rest of my response into a second post.

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Yes, Glee already needled me on those and I explained them further in the response I lost. :frowning: It just IRKS me to have to rewrite it all, but I will at least give Glee a response. He deserves that much.

Glee was dubious of that point also and I responded in the one I lost (arrgh again). but I will attempt to explain it again for him and for you. Picture this a moment, not everyone likes that kind of notoriety. About half of my cousins are multimillionaires - they own shopping malls in Portland, Oregon, and investments and stuff, the other half are either middle class or “poor as dirt” dairyists or farmers or loggers. Some of them are content and happy and some are not, it has nothing to do with whether they are rich, middle class, or poor. But I don’t know of any of them that would want to be notorious because they were given a million dollars for THAT reason. It is not at all the same as doing something mundane like flushing a commode or playing a game. Because anyone can do those things, the notoriety would be on the giver of the money (for being so strange), and the attention the receiver would get would die down relatively quickly because there is nothing notorious about what they did.
But if someone received a million bucks because they did something so unusual – proving a very controversial skill – can you imagine the notoriety that would kick up from however many quarters? I would imagine it would take years to die down, if that.
Besides, my cynical thought would be that the guy would never be satisfied with a person’s ‘proof’ no matter what test you passed.
The people I knew who had the skill, were quiet farmers, who dowsed wells for their neighbors as a favor - a community thing. When I picture one particular relative becoming famous, being followed around by the press and going on Johnny Carson (Oh, yeah, Letterman), being studied by groups of skeptics and doctors, and getting all gussied up with his ‘million dollars’ it makes me laugh. See, you are judging from your own paradigm, there really are people out there who, sure, wouldn’t mind the million dollars, but they aren’t willing to pay the price for it. Glee scoffed at my Mom not seeing a million dollars worth trying it, but he doesn’t know her. She thinks she is ugly because she had a teeny tiny waist when she married and 50 years and 4 kids later it is 5 times the size. She won’t let anyone take pictures of her. (My sis with her 21" waist wore my mom’s wedding dress and had to have the waist let out in order to fit into it. My mom is a Cherokee/Czech, 66 years, and looks like she weighs about 180 and she is 5’4". I call her “teddy bear” size and she’s an adorable grandmother.) With that sort of self-esteem, she would very literally hate to be made a spectacle.

I don’t know if that is a thousand words yet, but do you see what I am trying to picture to you? Without nitpicking any of my individual statements, that is?

So, I get it. Your definition of paranormal is anything undiscovered, out of the ordinary, or just something you don’t understand yet. I don’t know how “scientific” that definition is, but I can live with it. Seems a little wacky to me. I had the general impression that paranormal is related to psychic, or any of the tele-whosits - telekenesis, telepathy, etc…

This is what I was saying earlier. The people my kin said had this ability wouldn’t care if any ‘scientific types’ believed it was legit or not. Their attitude would be it got the job done and lets get on with it and they wouldn’t waste their time trying to prove it to anyone. Especially if those somebodies stood there with their arms across their chests and this antagonistic look on their face like, “Go ahead, just TRY to prove it to me and see how fast I can rip you down.” And then if you managed to prove yourself, you got pressured into becoming huge science experiment, probably for a whole lot more money too.

I don’t know what Pramanujan is like, but I thought he (she?) responded pretty well to the cutting remarks aimed at his beliefs.

Something else that bothers me about this statement, is the general pessimism. My idea of a true scientific mindset is one that is open to all possibilities and only crosses off a possibility when it has proven itself wrong. If you start with a closed mindset, forcing the possibilities to pry their way in in order to get attention, you are never going to see all there is to see because not all possibilities have the will or the power with which to force their way.

Okay, now THIS one I can at least partially defend. I have read at least TWO studies that refer to parts of the brain that aren’t used. I probably got the actual percentage from hearsay, but the existence of areas of the brain that we don’t use is an actuality. I suppose I thought that since the one was true then the other was also. I know the one study, if you can find it, was on the use of glossalalia (sp?). it was done at ORU by brain specialists there. They found that when a person used glossalalia, a part of the brain that they had never found to be active and didn’t know for what it was used, was activated and the activation raised the person’s (oh, gosh, what’s the word I’m looking for - resistance to disease - must be getting too late. 3am!) by 30%. So, if you want to check it out you can probably find it published somewhere. The other study had to do with the effects of of physical ‘abuse’ on a developing brain. I have tried to find that one again myself for other reasons, but I think I must have read it in a JAMA, and those aren’t available to the general public on the internet. :frowning:

Well, have at it guys. See what you can chop and pick at this time. :slight_smile:

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OH, aren’t you a sweetie! I used to love long walks on the beach especially at low tide when the clams are spitting geysers, but unfortunately you didn’t read my post carefully enough - I am a recent bilateral aka amputee. I’ve been to hell and back in the last four years and I think I look it, although people who get to know me disagree (they are just prejudiced - smile).