What you are falling prey to is called arrogant condescension. It’s a powerful bias, too!
I know that it’s important to you to deny that what other people have directly experienced repeatedly didn’t actually happen, and that’s fine. I’m most certainly not going to convince you that a bit of bent metal waggled around in my hand by typing those words on a message board. As I say, it’s not something I have a deep belief in, nor am I saying “dowsing’s real!”. It’s just something that happened a few times.
All humans are subject to powerful biases, which is why we invented sound scientific testing that controls for them, to help us separate what is true from what seems to be true.
So, I’m open to sound evidence and the conclusions of well designed tests that control for bias. What about you?
Since you found it “hilarious” that I wasn’t planning on setting up a double-blind test to scientifically evaluate something that’s happened casually a few times in my life, you clearly want me to say “no”, because it’s fun to entrap people with Science rather than just accept that, well, things happen sometimes that are kinda odd.
The answer is that I’m not the best person to set up or participate in a test of that sort, but I’d be curious to see unbiased tests that don’t involve just waving sticks over buckets.
What I’m interested is the topic that is the foundation of this thread, which is whether dowsing actually works, or whether it is a powerfully convincing superstion - and about the propagation of false information. By you overly expansive definition of “concern troll,” Rob’s OP is “concern trolling.”
