Aussie science chief touts "80% accuracy" for dowsers

[quote=“Skeptic, post:39, topic:47607”]
Judging dowsing by the entirely reliant objective criteria of whether it actually works[/quote]

Which was precisely my point - it is not an objective activity.

According to whom? Some gullible people you read about? Gullible people more often than not seem to project a faulty understanding of metaphysics into the outside world. But just because this commonly happens, does not mean that that’s what metaphysics actually are. Sure, many people are confused about such things. But getting into an is/is not argument is not going to teach anybody about what these things actually are. Saying that something is “not real” and “exists only in your mind” are not equivocal statements.

How is it weird to say that dowsing is actually a mental exercise? Just because this assertion exists outside of your argument? Why do you think it’s not weird to judge such concepts in concrete terms? Sure, the CSIRO person may not know what they are talking about. But skeptics who look through the objective world for metaphysical ideas are confused as to the domain of their discipline. If only gullible people conflate metaphysics with objective reality, why would you want to do the same?

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Don’t forget this guy… Lots o cash to be found in such pursuits:
Dowsing for bombs: Maker of useless bomb detectors convicted of fraud.

A long time ago, I worked on a survey crew. We had trouble looking a water line in a vacant field. Our crew chief drove to a city building and asked if so-so was in today. So-so was in and my crew chief was stoked. I asked what was the deal and he told me he was a dowser.

The dude came out to the site and spent about an hour finding the water line. I was dumbstruck - couldn’t believe it, but our CC accepted it as fact and we marked the line.

Don’t know how it all turned out, but I do know we didn’t have to go out and redo the mapping. Not even sure if the CC told our boss.

Because it doesn’t actually have anything to do with water! It’s like “the holy grail”, or “the philosopher’s stone”, it’s a concept. That is what “divination” actually is about. This is why esoteric philosophies were not usually taught openly! Gullible people are likely to take them at face value rather than understand what they mean.

And we are done.

Finding stuff is the point of dowsing - and even if you debate that, it is specifically the point of the dowsing refereed to in the OP. Testing whether it works better than chance in controlled, double blind experiments is prima facie scientific objectivity.

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People like popobawa4u help enable the fuzzy thinking that allows frauds like that to happen.

I found this study…

http://www.geotech1.com/cgi-bin/pages/common/index.pl?page=lrl&file=info/kassel/kassel1.dat

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According to Dr. Marshall, the new head of CSIRO, as described in the article we are talking about and quoted in the very comment you first replied to. The entire context has been about dowsing as a way of finding things, the way it is usually sold.

Nobody has been attacking metaphysics or even brought it up. Your strange defense of it here, in the face of people criticizing what is obviously poor science or charlatanism instead, doesn’t really present it in the best light.

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The second half of that article,

shows a subtle reason why that contributes to why so many still believe in dowsing: publishing bias.

The Hessische Rundfunk TV network, who paid for the
expenses of setting up the dowsing tests, had covered the proceedings
assiduously. Their crews were unobtrusively everywhere, taping every
aspect of the tests. Such involvement of personnel and equipment, aside
from the outlay of expenses for the basic water delivery system and
security procedures, is quite expensive. They had planned to prepare a
TV special, and GWUP had granted them this right in return for their
participation. Crews and executives from the network were as eager as
all of us to see the final results, but as it became evident that the
dowsers had failed spectacularly, interest faded quickly.
Crews packed
away their equipment, scheduled post-results interviews were canceled,
and the TV special never took place. It was a case of a “non-story” to
Hessische Rundfunk, though if the dowsers had been successful, we expect
it would have been a celebration of rare dimensions. - J.R.

Even scientific journals are prone to this bias. They like to publish positive stories rather than negative ones, which can to a distortion of science, where one positive result gets published and whole bunch of negative ones get passed over, falsely making people think the positive study is representative.

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Are… are you saying people dowse to find themselves, rather than water?

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Cool. For the record, I didn’t mean to imply there weren’t any studies, just that I have’t seen them and they therefore do not exist.

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Okay, as long as we are separating the idea of whether dowsing works from the idea of whether people who dowse can achieve the ends of dowsing. It could be the case that dowsing doesn’t work at all and that the best person to call if you need to find underground water is a dowser, which could merit investigation into how that person finds water. (An investigation that is not going to be fruitful if we actually believe in dowsing - like I said, this science chief sounds like a nut)

Or maybe it’s just that sealed containers don’t create the same gravitationally anomalous electromagnetic fields? Water put there for the purpose of testing dousing doesn’t have the same kind of chi.

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The science chief is referring to dowsing as a way to find water, not as a practice of an esoteric philosophy. You can think of dowsing as something other than a way to find water all you want, but that is not the topic of this discussion.

As long as it can persuade Tony Abbot to give you a job, it must have worked.

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This, absolutely.

I made the error of getting quite upset when Prof Edzard Ernst was appointed to the first ever Chair of Complementary Medicine at Exeter University, UK. I mean, what a total, complete and utter waste of money, right? Except that he then went and systematically investigated the claims of various forms of ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine’ practitioners, using the research tools of evidence based medicine. Then he published the results as high quality peer reviewed evidence of what worked (not much at all) and what didn’t (an awful lot).

Unfortunately he crossed swords with Prince Charles, a notorious complementary medicine woo pusher himself, and was effectively ousted. :frowning:

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In a thread that’s getting a bit contentious, this gave me a happy smile! :smile:

Also: would :heart: but on enforced cool-down for a few more hours.

That isn’t blather. It’s saying there may be something here which could be related to intuitive subconscious processing. That’s something that we all have and disregarding the effect is also bad science.

Double blind randomised controlled trials in medicine are designed to reduce unconscious knowledge and processing effecting biased results as we have to account for the presence of unconscious decisions. Equally, in Psychology there would be no formal understanding of how facial expressions of emotion and body language affect others’ perceptions of individuals, if there had been no investigation of the small number of people who are “magically” good at assessing others.

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Excellent point, except popo also refers to dowsing as being connected to esoteric philosophies, in the same way as “the holy grail” and “the philosopher’s stone” are. It seems to me that the form of dowsing he is referring to is a purely spiritual/metaphysical practice which has no connection to literally finding water.

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Yes, this is what I am saying practices of divination actually involve. Although this is “self” outside of the usual context. Not unlike the automatic writing of the surrealists, or the cut-ups of Burroughs and Gysin. As Gysin had put it: “access to what you know, but don’t know that you know”. Divination, like any other ritual, works only as an internal thought exercise. And only the very credulous - who are many - look for any outside explanations or results. It need not involve any superstitious belief in anything.

This appears to constitute an irrelevant digression to some, but I think it’s central to evaluating either scientific evidence, or any sort of disciplines of thinking. I think that it helps to consider that there can be different levels of analysis employed when considering any belief or practices. Like the etic/emic dichotomy of anthropologists, it would be bad science for them to take everything the subjects of their study say at face value. When the debunkers take these ideas at face value also it gets silly, like cleaving a wood on television to prove the Jesus isn’t inside it. It’s great to be skeptical, but knowing what the context of your enquiry is can be helpful. There are things it would be silly to take literally,

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From the article:

Dr Larry Marshall grew up working on farms and his family run a property in drought-affected Queensland.

He’s interested in the development of technology that would make it
easier for farmers to dowse or divine for water on their properties.

"When I see that as a scientist, it makes me question, ‘is there
instrumentality that we could create that would enable a machine to find
that water?’

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