Dowsing

[none]

I also have done this on sites, after initally being sceptical, then having it demonstarted and having a go myself with success, unsuprsingly upon retrying under controlled conditions with no visual clues it did not work. This does not lessen its usefulness but I suggest it does not nothing but tap into a number of visual and other clues that you may not consider directly. Be interested to hear if anyone has researched this. That is my hyopthesis anyway, if anyone has anything beyond 'it is magic and therefore cannot be tested' i would be interested.

[Andy Hall]

O-live for today.

[Tony Polson]

I was a sceptic until I found underground services that no-one knew existed and of which there were no clues of any kind.

[none]

If you are so certain there were no clues of any kind then you could repeat it under controlled conditions and gain yourself $1000000. What you say you do not need that money, surely a charity that would benefit greatly from that sum of money raised by at most a few days work by you, it would be the decent thing to do surely?

[Tony Polson]

Dowsing is not something I do for a living. It was something very peripheral to what I used to do - a very minor but surprisingly useful enhancement to my former job, from which I have now retired.

I see no need to prove anything to anyone - not you, nor anyone else on here, nor the man who you claim is offering a huge sum of money.

Whether any of you believe me, or not, is of no consequence. It will not affect my life either way. The only thing that matters is whether or not it worked for me when it would have been useful, and it did.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Thats one cue.

another one is wandering..yet another one is someone who isn't obviously responding to the same cues that you are.

An excellent one is a reflection in a shop window that lets you see round a blind corner..

Birds flying upo on a country road tells you there is another car there..

Millions of little cues.

Plus, a sixth sense...which may be no more than a generalised feeling of a wrong pattern..or not.

There is an apocryphal story of some racing driver, who slowed down for an unseen accident, because he noticed that as a popular driver, this time instead of faces, all he could see in the crowd was the backs of peoples heads staring at the accident...

[Mary Fisher]

Hey, Tony, I'm on your side ;-)

And I believe you.

I don't believe in luck!

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

If it's a decent thing to do why doesn't the challenger give it straight to charity and cut out the middle man?

[Mary Fisher]

Ah well ... if I remember I'll look for someone else :-)

Mary

>

[Guy King]

The message from The Natural Philosopher contains these words:

When I was a driving instructor it was noticeable that there came a time with most learners[1] when they'd say something like "I knew he was going to do that". I'd known it too, but it was satisfying when the pupil started to develop that "sixth sense" about what was going to happen and when. Then you had to teach them that though it's a useful skill you can't use it as your only source of safety!

It's hard to prove because it's difficult to do controlled experiments on such things, but I suspect that this dawning of perception happened sooner as I got better at the job.

[1] Some never did it. There appeared to be a correlation[2] with not having ridden a bicycle as a kid. [2] Why does that have a double r?

[tinnews]

You tell me where to find the explanation of dowsing and I'll tell you where to find the one about concrete - deal?

[tinnews]

... but that doesn't answer my criticism of dowsing does it!

As the above shows there *are* explanations of how concret works but there *aren't* explanations of how dowsing works.

[tinnews]

... and when tested under proper conditions it *doesn't* work.

I remember playing at dowsing at school in the sixth form once. (Wow, that was a few years ago). We quite quickly convinced ourselves that we could do it and played at demonstrating it to each other for quite a while.

The someone actually came up with a proper testing mechanism and it turned out that we couldn't do it.

It's very, very, very easy indeed to fool yourself and others around you about things like this. The tests you need to do to decide whether dowsing (or similar things) are real are quite subtle.

[tinnews]

This I think is almost certainly the explanation.

Tests done where all other clues are carefully removed *and* the dowser has no previous knowledge of the site show the results of the dowser are the same as a random guesser would get. If, on the other hand, the dowser knows the site and/or there are lots of visual clues then someone with experience who can (consciously or subconsciously) use those cluse will do better than chance.

[Andy Hall]

I wonder if that's how magnetic water conditioners work?

[Guy King]

The message from Andy Hall contains these words:

Would you like a wooden spoon with which to do your stirring? (insert smiley here)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh there are, but none of them fit within the current worldview of science.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Which is not, of itself, and argument against dowsing.

If you regard it as a technique to make conscious what the subconscious already knows.

Ditto palm reading, tarot cards and the like.

If you can concede that the human mind screens out most of what it doesn't need to deal with and that techniques can make some of this information available to the conscious mind, then whether it's from the 'normal' senses or some that haven't quite been defined yet, it is certainly an explanation for most, if not all, forms of 'magic' and divination..

[Steve Firth]

Your "point" was vacuous, we do need to know how the setting of concrete works.

Dowsing however doesn't work so the question of how it works is irrelevant. Water divining can work, but water divination is more of case of knowledge of local aquifers and of the surface signs of subsurface water.

[tinnews]

The standard excuse - i.e. an explanation that doesn't actually make sense.