Dowsing

[mrs quoad]

No...I posted the article.because for most of this thread people have been calling the use of dowsers a form of magicky witchcraft

Which that article cannot dispel.

The fact that dowsing is still an option that many civil engineers will utilise is very interesting...seeing as civil engineers are generally not influenced by woo woo... and it does lead one to think that there is a distinct possibility that dowsing helps locate groundwater.

This doesn't hold together*.

If you want to hold up scientists or engineers as authoritative, then why not look at the actual source of their notional authority - science, and scientific method?

The science rests on methodology; the methodology in that piece is appalling; the science quoted on the previous page clearly identifies no relationship between dowsers' guesses and the location of water.

Arguments from loose associations with authority figures - whilst bypassing the underpinning processes that might give those individuals authority - can't hold up.


*Moreover, the structure of the argument you're presenting here is:

1. There was one 'light-hearted,' methodologically poor piece in a civil engineering journal 17 years ago;
2. It could say nothing about dowsing;
3. This one article, however, proves that civil engineers use this approach widely;
4. Civil engineers are authoritative people;
5. Therefore, there is a 'distinct possibility' that dowsing works.

This can't hold up - there is no content to this argument beyond a loose series of associations, not one of which is grounded in anything about the article except the title of the journal it was published in. 16 years ago.

 

[Baronage-Phase]

You're going to have to take your grievances to someone else. I didn't call you a twat or a prick and "witchcraft" has been commonly used to describe dowsing in the mainstream media eg. in a link you posted on the first page here. Dowsers are also called "water witchers", witchy type sites wax lyrical about dowsing and Martin Luther condemned the practice as witchcraft 500-odd years ago.

Yes and not so long before that everyone thought we were the centre of the universe and the planet was flat.

I'm asking, albeit rhetorically....why are intelligent people on urban calling it woo woo and witchcraft ?

Not a dig at you...just a general query.

 

[Signal 11]

The journalist may well have been taken in by what he thought was a proper paper published by someone who really does have credentials in a scientific field.

credentials in a scientific field?
Hans-Dieter Betz - Wikipedia

I see what the confusion is now. My post was badly worded. I meant that since he really had scientific credentials they may have taken his article in the UFO magazine more seriously than they should, as it was presented as a scientific article.

 

[Signal 11]

Yes...I'm asking for the review you're talking about... And I can't find it.
Which review?

I asked you to tell me which of those references supported your claims. And you told me to go away and read them. I've done that. Now it's your turn to do some of the homework you should have done before posting it.

 

[Baronage-Phase]

Which that article cannot dispel.


This doesn't hold together*.

If you want to hold up scientists or engineers as authoritative, then why not look at the actual source of their notional authority - science, and scientific method?

The science rests on methodology; the methodology in that piece is appalling; the science quoted on the previous page clearly identifies no relationship between dowsers' guesses and the location of water.

Arguments from loose associations with authority figures - whilst bypassing the underpinning processes that might give those individuals authority - can't hold up.


*Moreover, the structure of the argument you're presenting here is:

1. There was one 'light-hearted,' methodologically poor piece in a civil engineering journal 17 years ago;
2. It could say nothing about dowsing;
3. This one article, however, proves that civil engineers use this approach widely;
4. Civil engineers are authoritative people;
5. Therefore, there is a 'distinct possibility' that dowsing works.

This can't hold up - there is no content to this argument beyond a loose series of associations, not one of which is grounded in anything about the article except the title of the journal it was published in. 16 years ago.

I'm certainly not trying to prove or disprove anything or anyone.
But I think that to completely label something as witchcraft because it's not scientifically proven is a mistake.

Im probably very biased because of my experience of dowsing...my grandad used to do it..
And he was by no means into witchcraft.

 

[keybored]

Yes and not so long before that everyone thought we were the centre of the universe and the planet was flat.

You conveniently ignored the bits that illustrate that people still use the term up till the present day.

 

[keybored]

I'm asking, albeit rhetorically....why are intelligent people on urban calling it woo woo and witchcraft ?

Well, I wonder why that could be?

 

[Baronage-Phase]

I asked you to tell me which of those references supported your claims. And you told me to go away and read them. I've done that. Now it's your turn to do some of the homework you should have done before posting it.

Well..I did try but wasn't able to access them. I'm asking you to link what you read so that I can read it...not prove or disprove anything.

 

[mrs quoad]

Wrt the above argument for authority by association...

I've just searched the entire back archives of New Civil Engineer for 'dowsing.' Of the nine pieces that came back, seven were about wind farms. Two had any relevance to actual dowsing (as discussed here). The first was the 2001 article; the second was a letter from 2006.

I was disappointed to read Gordon Rose's suggestion that dowsing be used for finding below ground services (NCE 4 May 2006).

Given our profession's claim to have some sort of rational basis for our activities, I was expecting some kind of humorous twist, but no, it was apparently serious.

Although dowsing practioners seem to believe in what they are doing, perhaps fooled by the ideomotor effect, properly controlled tests have always failed to show any success rates above that of chance.

Anyone who can show statistically signicant better results can help themselves to $1M, courtesy of the James Randi Educational Foundation.

I hope not to see other paranormal claims disgrace the pages of NCE - what next, crystal healing for accident victims?

Paul Barnard (M) paul@psaa.me. uk

The magazine is monthly. A quick scout suggests there are 16 substantive articles in the latest issue. 12 * 16 * 17 = ballpark 3,000 articles published since 2001.

And one of those touched on dowsing.

I don't think it's credible to claim that this is in any way indicative of dowsing being widely used by civil engineers, or of it having a credible reputation amongst them.

 

[mrs quoad]

Im probably very biased because of my experience of dowsing...my grandad used to do it..

And robust evidence is what allows us to begin thinking beyond our expectations and experience, to understand where very human processes (like confirmation bias) may lead us to believe things that are not the case.

This is why robust evidence is more important than e.g. millions of individuals' positive beliefs about homeopathic remedies.

 

[Baronage-Phase]

I can't say I don't believe dowsing because I have seen it work...And I fully accept that it is not proven by science with a big S....
Yet civil engineers still pull it out of the bag ... even in major water companies (10 out of 12 in the UK)...until the press embarrassed the life out of them by calling their use of dowsing "witchcraft".
That's about as far as we have gotten.

I'm normally sceptical about many things but I'm afraid that my opinion is coloured and it's difficult to dismiss experience when it was so accurate.
I'd like to join in the scepticism...I just can't...because of personal experience.
I'll leave it there.

 

[Ralph Llama]

I see what the confusion is now. My post was badly worded. I meant that since he really had scientific credentials they may have taken his article in the UFO magazine more seriously than they should, as it was presented as a scientific article.

The quote was from the PM journalist.
And what about the German Government?

Betz also investigates Radiesthesia and Dowsing, ten years in Order by the German Government.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Dieter_Betz#cite_note-2

 

[gentlegreen]

Have we had Tesla mentioned yet ?

 

[mrs quoad]

I can't say I don't believe dowsing because I have seen it work...

Should all people should believe everything that they believe they have seen work?

 

[Ralph Llama]

No but there is something quite wrong with you if the only things you believe have to be proved in a lab !!!! (gravity/light)

 

[Baronage-Phase]

Should all people should believe everything that they believe they have seen work?

I was speaking for myself alone.
Not all people.

 

[mrs quoad]

I was speaking for myself alone.
Not all people.

Ah.

 

[gentlegreen]

"An "Electro-metabograph", an apparatus which supposedly diagnosed and cured diseases by using radio waves"

 

[Ralph Llama]

Oh go and smoke some banana peel ! It might help you digest those broccoli proteins which will give you the energy to solder together the scam electronics you bought from china.

 

[Signal 11]

The quote was from the PM journalist.
And what about the German Government?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Dieter_Betz#cite_note-2

That reference is a bit confused.

Schröter is the one who worked for the German government’s overseas aid agency for 10 years as a water engineer. He claimed to have used dowsing as well as conventional methods while he was out there.

After those 10 years in which he did his own "experiments" he told his story to Betz. Betz says that he didn't believe in dowsing before that but Schröter convinced him. So he wrote up Schröter's claims as the article linked before. He could only get it published in the the UFO magazine since it wasn't a proper scientific study.

Betz wanted to get the subject some credibility and since he was a scientist he decided to do a proper controlled study. He got funding for that. The result was the Munich study, which as you've accepted, showed that there was nothing in it after all:

it is difficult to imagine a set of experimental results that would represent a more persuasive disproof of the ability of dowsers to do what they claim. The experiments thus can and should be considered a decisive failure by the dowsers.

 

[Ralph Llama]

Are you shure ? -

In hundreds of cases the dowsers were able to predict the depth of the water source and the yield of the well to within 10 percent or 20 percent," says Hans-Dieter Betz, a physicist at the University of Munich, who headed the research group.

 

[Signal 11]

Yes.

 

[kropotkin]

Yes and not so long before that everyone thought we were the centre of the universe and the planet was flat.

I'm asking, albeit rhetorically....why are intelligent people on urban calling it woo woo and witchcraft ?

Not a dig at you...just a general query.

Well, I can't speak for intelligent people, but for me the answer to that is that something that seems like magic (has no clearly plausible mechanism for working) simply has to get over a bar of evidence to be taken seriously. It's always been this way, with everything from the heliocentric model of the solar system in Ptolemy's time, through to Einsteinian claims about reality in the last century.
There is a bar of evidence, and the way our approaches work mean that there is a higher evidence bar for things that seem to contradict the prevailing worldview. The great thing about science is that if that evidence is found (as it incontrovertibly was in the two cases above) the entire worldview is changed to accommodate it. There is resistance to change though, but I think that just tends to make everything more rigorous.

And as multiple people have pointed out, dowsing has been tested multiple times and hasn't met any evidence bars, so has been dismissed as magical thinking. The fact that some apparently learned people still believe in it probably just points to the fallacy of trusting authority ("an Engineer") rather than science ("no correlation found").

 

[Signal 11]

btw

The myth of the flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages in Europe was that the Earth is flat, instead of spherical.

Myth of the flat Earth - Wikipedia

 

[kropotkin]

I don't know if this has been posted, but it is a good critical look at the Munich Betz study that really destroys its conclusions

 

[Ralph Llama]

Yes.

Lol. Expand on that a little... I`m not going to take your word for it

It`s stated on his wiki page, as well by the PM journalist. Are you sure your not confused ?

 

[Baronage-Phase]

I don't know if this has been posted, but it is a good critical look at the Munich Betz study that really destroys its conclusions

Yes. I posted a graph from it.
The one of the single tosser who had some success...about 60% accuracy.

 

[kropotkin]

Yes. I posted a graph from it.
The one of the single tosser who had some success...about 60% accuracy.

Dowser?

 

[Ralph Llama]

Well, I can't speak for intelligent people, but for me the answer to that is that something that seems like magic (has no clearly plausible mechanism for working) simply has to get over a bar of evidence to be taken seriously. It's always been this way, with everything from the heliocentric model of the solar system in Ptolemy's time, through to Einsteinian claims about reality in the last century.
There is a bar of evidence, and the way our approaches work mean that there is a higher evidence bar for things that seem to contradict the prevailing worldview. The great thing about science is that if that evidence is found (as it incontrovertibly was in the two cases above) the entire worldview is changed to accommodate it. There is resistance to change though, but I think that just tends to make everything more rigorous.

And as multiple people have pointed out, dowsing has been tested multiple times and hasn't met any evidence bars, so has been dismissed as magical thinking. The fact that some apparently learned people still believe in it probably just points to the fallacy of trusting authority ("an Engineer") rather than science ("no correlation found").

Good luck ignoring all the life on the planet and gravity

 

[gentlegreen]

Oh go and smoke some banana peel ! It might help you digest those broccoli proteins which will give you the energy to solder together the scam electronics you bought from china.

Not Scam at all - just unbelievably cheap