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Found an article from three years later which strongly suggests the basic phenomena that was being commented on:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/urban-new-agers-have-taken-over-the-art-of-dowsing-1-38424068/
If you ever happen to be around people who construction related to water lines, etc, and want to start a fight, bring this up.
I have seen people with masters degrees in civil engineering defend this. It's just this weird holdout of insanity for some reason.
Heard a story the other day about a plumber who dowsed to find a water leak in an outdoor pipe.
Had to bite my tongue to stop myself from pointing out that the teller of the story unconsciously mentioned that the water leak also happened to be in the exact spot where the grass had been growing faster than the rest of the lawn in recent weeks.
I forgot all about this but everyone I know who has a well had a dowser find the location for them, even if it took two or three tries.
I know a utility locator that swears by it and demonstrate it. It worked for them, not me. My powers of skepticism kept the witchcraft at bay.
I have had just the MOST frustrating conversations with people I know to be incredibly intelligent lol.
Im normally very live and live. Like so long as your not convincing/have been convinced to go for reki as a substitute for cancer treatment... Whatever makes you happy. You feel happier holding a quartz rock? Then technically it is working, cool rocks make me happy to, you do you.
I have no idea why dowsing just gets under my skin lol.
It's the difference between "this (placebo) makes me feel better" vs "this is real factual (magic)".
One is a lie they tell themselves, the other is a lie they tell you.
Good dowsers have pretty well developed skills at spotting signs of underground water, and a good understanding of where civil engineers put pipes
Lol, that's actually what I've read. In cases was someone was enough an "old timer" it's likley they'd been to the site before, or had worked enough or had enough intuition. In those cases the chi squared was decent with the rods compared without.
... In a new site built specifically for testing, not so much.
So that's interesting from a psychology perspective, something giving someone "permission" to focus, but water divining it was not.
Yep. Good dowsers do terribly at tests where water pipes and empty pipes have been run through a test area at random.
I suspect they already knew where the utility was, and were fucking with you.
It was pvc and they only locate power and other cables, so it's not like we had any confirmation. I stay skeptical.
They don't do that either. If they did that you couldn't walk around with a pacemaker.
No, people swear by this, honestly. It's not like asking someone for a "left handed smoke shifter" as an initiation right. People rural and metro genuinely think this is a real thing. At a few hundred a pop I would wager there's ~$50k in these things that will be purches by various contractors out of the new infrastructure build in the US. It's wild.
I tried it once and it was a neat experience. I could feel some sort of force crossing the rods as I slowly walked along. Almost felt like horizontal gravity.
To me it is the misframing of it that is the problem:
IF a person holds 2 bent wires, or a pair of sticks, or a y-shaped piece of willow, or whatever, & they walk around & to them it feels like something's going through it when they're over moving-water or moving-electricity ( I've a relative who tells me he can't tell the difference between the 2, from the dowsing: they give him identical signal )..
THEN you can't claim that it is some property-of-matter-divorced-from-their-unconscious-minds!!
THEY are the ones doing it: THEIR unconscious-minds are immersed in all they are doing.
If their unconscious-minds can somehow make accurate determinations, and communicate that determination through the "feelings" they feel when holding their dousing-rods .. how is that pseudoscience?
Scientism's falsely pretending to be Science bugs me.
The prejudice encoded in "matter cannot produce that result, & OF COURSE their minds have no validity, ESPECIALLY THEIR UNCONSCIOUS MINDS.. so therefore NO kind of mind can possibly have any place in the scientific understanding of anything.."
..prejudice isn't Science.
IF a phenomena is produced by a mixture of mind & matter, especially a mixture of unconscious-mind & conscious-mind & matter,
THEN correct science has to study each of the dimensions of the system, correctly, & the way they're interacting.
Prejudice, however ideologically-"proper" or currently-fashionable, isn't Science.
Anyways, I'll never expect to see the "skeptics" do proper science, when their physicalist-existentialist ideology can "solve" everything much more conveniently, to them..
Ideology & prejudice are inseparable: they're opposite sides of the same "coin".
How does guys pushing wheelbarrows in small circles equate to dowsing?
They're all holding wooden handles that converge to a directional point. Same as what a dowsing stick looks like - it's a forked stick.
This also explains why they all have wheel barrows.
The connection to dowsing rods is a big stretch, I really don’t think that’s the joke at all. Them effectively doing nothing is a closer connection to homeopathy I think, but I don’t think that’s the joke either.
You're confusing rods with a dowsing stick. Also you have no alternative hypothesis, where as I've linked to an article from the time that discusses the cultural phenomenon in question.
Rods or sticks it’s a big stretch to think the wheelbarrow represents dowsing. But also the grip on a wheelbarrow is more like the stick than the rods which are bent about 90 degrees and held like guns. Maybe you don’t know how dowsing rods work. I can link to an article about spinning in circles to align your chakras, equally new age, as likely wrong as dowsing is. I don’t need to propose an alternative to criticize your theory, but I did and you ignored it. Your article is 3 years younger than the comic, and fads come and go in less time than that. You don’t walk in small circles when dowsing. There are more facts and details to go against dowsing being the explanation than there are to support dowsing.
I had no idea there was this many dowsing kooks still around. Learn what a scientific mechanism of action is, then go try to prove one for dowsing. It's bunkem bullshit.
As for the cartoon; think what you will about it. All new age stuff is bullshit regardless.
Wow thanks, I would not have got that