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Drought Inspires a Boom In Pseudoscience, From Rain Machines To 'Water Witches'
merbs (2708203) writes Across drought-stricken California, farmers are desperate for water. Now, many of them are calling dowsers. These "water witches," draped in dubious pseudoscience or self-assembled mythologies—or both—typically use divining rods and some sort of practiced intuition to "find" water. The professional variety do so for a fee. And business is booming. They're just part of a storied tradition of pseudoscientific hucksters exploiting our thirst for water, with everything from cloudbusters to rainmachines to New Age rituals.
...unless someone was taught it over a series of Sundays. :/
I suppose ignorance on things like this is generational, and we'll stamp it out slowly, like racism or smoking.
I know this runs against everything /. but I have seen it work a couple of times.
Why do you think that an unconfirmed anecdote being presented fallaciously as an argument is against everything /.?
It would actually be astonishing if no one had "seen it work a couple of times", for several reasons. One, if there were a 100% failure rate dousing would have been abandoned years ago. Even pre-scientific peoples mostly abandoned things that were never, ever correlated with their nominal goals.
Second, given humans are known to be prone to confirmation bias, we can predict that almost everyone who has ever seen a dowser identify one of the many, many places where water can be found will come away believing "dowsing works".
So a large number of scientifically illiterate people saying, "Hey I saw it work a few times that proves it's true so I believe it!" is exactly what science would predict if dowsing doesn't work.
If dowsing did work science would predict a bunch of peer-reviewed studies systematically detailing how accurate it is and investigating the factors that influence it's accuracy.
We see the former, not the latter.
Posts like yours actually constitute evidence that dowsing does not work.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
A dowser is less effective than a geologist and bears, at the minimum, a higher opportunity cost over the average (of instances of people searching for water with a dowser instead of a geologist).
A fine economic analysis, but you're forgetting the balance-of-costs comparison.
If what you saved using a dowser (who, by your own scenario, is cheaper than a geologist) is more than the cost of two wasted wells, the dowser was a cost-effective alternative. In that case.
If, on the other hand, the dowser wasn't much cheaper, or you had to sink 5 dry wells, or your dowser never finds water, the dowser was a net loss.
I think that on balance, the latter scenarios are more likely. If you're thinking about choosing dowsing, you're better off just throwing darts at a large map of your property and saving that cost for the same effectiveness.
But if you're going to do an economic analysis, show all your work.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It would be interesting to see if drilling randomly in 3 other places on the property also generated water at around 70 feet. It could very well be that the property just sits on a lot of shallow water.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
my father called the local dowser in for his house in a remote part of SW Ireland.
The low areas of Ireland get more than 40 inches of rain a year, and the mountains get as much as 80 inches. I would be much more surprised if he found an area without ground water.
Found 3 spots that felt just right, drilled the first, and found water at 70 feet.
How deep did you have to drill for the holes in the control group?