As much as I like to criticize the NYT, I think this is unfair. The original article makes it clear that it's BS. The article says clearly, "scientists and groundwater experts make clear that the dowsers’ methods are unscientific and amount to a kind of hocus-pocus".<p>What I think people don't understand here is that the NYT doesn't just come out and call people assholes. A traditional journalist is not supposed to insert themselves into the frame to that extent. The highfalutin' journalist approach to the problem is to paint a sympathetic picture of the asshole in ways that make it clear that they are an asshole.
There are two subsequent sentences in the first paragraph. One is complete bullshit, while the other has correct reasoning. It really doesn't help when skeptic articles do this.<p>> The very notion of dowsing — that an above-ground stick will react to the presence of something hundreds of feet below — breaks the laws of physics.<p>Really? It breaks the laws of physics? Tell that to my gravimeter. Oh you are saying a human with a simple wooden stick is not a gravimeter? Idk they are quite complicated. They can be many things. Maybe they can be a gravimeter too?<p>> Every single controlled test of the practice has failed, yielding results indistinguishable from chance.<p>This is the important bit. We know that "dowsing" doesn't work because we tried it many times, carefully, and so far it never worked better than chance. It has nothing to do with breaking the laws of physics.
This isn’t both sides treatment, this is reporting on the desperation of vineyard managers in a drought that would shell out around $1000 (when geologists charge several times that) for bogus services. Other commenters have problems with the NYT including the personal wacky views of some dowsers and vineyard managers but what’s the alternative? Omitting them? I want to know as a reader the people behind throwing money away for these dowsers and why, and I got that information instead of being babied by a reporter.<p>Not once does the article mention efficacy of geologists or dowsers because I didn’t think that’s what the article was about. It read more like, “Hey some vineyards are hiring crazy people and here are some of their claims that are widely disputed. Weird world right?.” An example is when they contrast the different feelings dowsers get: one feels hot like a battery, another feels cold chills, and yet another just swings a pendulum on a map and marks it with a sharpie like a magic spell.<p>People who read this and think they want a dowser will find another article or blog to succumb to confirmation bias anyway. Let’s not take our frustration with misinformation out on normal reporting.
I'm an atheist. But this is perhaps a trickier issue than it might seem at first glance.<p>Yes, the claims of "water witches" are objectively untrue.<p>In a very real sense, it is fraudulent to charge for such "services."<p>However, the supernatural claims of <i>any</i> religion are equally untrue. And just about any major organized religion expects money from its followers either directly or indirectly in terms of donations, tithing, tax breaks, etc. In an objective sense these practices are all just as fraudulent as a "water witch" charging for their services.<p>And this is where the trickiness arises - do we want to single out <i>some</i> religions for debunking, while allowing others' claims to go unquestioned?<p>I don't like the idea of marks forking over money for these fraudulent water dowsing services provided by "water witches", nor the idea of a publication like the NYT lending any credence whatsoever to such antiscience.<p>But I'm also not in love with giving established world religions a free pass while picking on the smaller and less centralized religions. It's not too long ago that we literally burned "witches" here in America, and unfortunately it is common throughout history.
I don't believe dowsing is real - but Arthur C. Clarke had made a statement at one point that it didn't seem completely outside the realm of possibility that there could be an evolutionary advantage for people to have some subconscious ability to notice environmental signals of the presence of water (assuming such signals exist.)<p>These statements were made back in the days of "In Search Of ...", etc., when there were a lot of books and shows about pseudo-scientific phenomena like The Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Astronauts, Bigfoot, etc. It really wasn't all that long ago that it wasn't considered complete insane to be studying these phenomena and have details published in peer-review journals<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI</a>
I read the article. I think it made it pretty clear that dowsing had no basis in science.<p>To me the article was more about the people / desperation...<p>Sometimes I think people believe that almost any portrayal that isn't entirely negative of a thing they don't like is 'both sides'.
I'm putting myself in the mind of someone hundreds of years ago that literally has no idea where to dig a well.<p>If it is all to chance anyway, there are probably a lot worse ways to "flip a coin". At least you can <i>feel</i> like you're divining where to dig.<p>How that ever persisted into the 20th Century and to now is perplexing but probably says a lot about human nature.
There are four main explanations for how rods move during dowsing.<p>1. Random chance.<p>2. The operator is a sensor and the rods the indicator. The person moves the rods unconsciously in response to some internal perception.<p>3. The rods are moved from outside by supernatural forces.<p>4. The person moves the rod unconsciously and doesn't sense anything external.<p>I have tried dowsing and think its a either 2 or 4. It's definitely the operator moving the rods. The question then becomes why.<p>It's within the realm of nature that organisms can sense light, magnetism, humidity, heat etc. It's also likely that we could indicate where things are from a kind of unconscious intuition or a guess of where something could be.<p>If you were to do an experiment, I'd suggest using buried electrical wires indoors or outside, as these someone should have actual plans for.<p>In my experiments with a group of people using a pendulum, the targets identified were basically the same as when asked a different group of people consciously to choose. In other words, #4.
The cost of a free thought is that some people will believe in some weird stuff.<p>I think this is much preferable to the alternative of a controlled ecosystem of ideas, for which there are no positive historical examples and many negative ones.
I recall reading somewhere (maybe in "The Straight Dope"?) that experienced dowsers that have worked for a long time in a given area learn to pick up on surface features and on geological formations that are correlated with subsurface water.<p>Their dowsing rods are not reacting to the water. They are reacting to the dowser's unconscious recognition of those features and formations. The way they hold them makes them very sensitive to very slight movements on the part of the dowser, so that they have no idea that they are the ones moving the rods.<p>PS: yup, it was in "The Straight Dope" [1].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.straightdope.com/21341336/does-dowsing-for-water-really-work" rel="nofollow">https://www.straightdope.com/21341336/does-dowsing-for-water...</a>
The Times is known for much worse.<p>E.g., throughout 43's two terms, the stories were always whatever vice-43 or his enablers insisted was true, and <i>never</i> that vice-43 and his enablers were known to be lying when they said it. It is what got us mired in Iraq.<p>When a public figure expresses what is factually true or false, and is in fact false, it is actual news that they are doing that. That is the "lede": Public Official Openly Lying to Public. It is not surprising that they do, but it is still news when they do it, and in the public interest to get on record. What they are lying about is trivial except insofar as it reveals that they are trying to draw our attention away from something else.<p>Finding what that something else is would be a useful activity for a reporter.
I used the services of such a 'water witch' in India. Not because I trust them, but because of the social 'pressure'. Since friends and relatives use them, I just used them.<p>When acquifers were not depleted, every 'water witch' was right. Once acquifers are depleted, they are useless. That's how I look at them.
I think what they're calling the both-sides treatment is misnamed to make it sound better than it is. One quote from each side isn't an equal treatment of both sides, it's a biased treatment towards the side with less to say.
I read a paper once about an ancient tribe of hunters who had exhausted the local fauna and consulted the wisdom of the spirits through an oracle bone ceremony for the next bounty.<p>In essence, the oracle bone would give them a random direction. If there was nothing, they'd ask again, if there was something, they would keep asking. Doesn't matter. The important function of consulting the oracle bones was that they were randomly distributing their hunting patterns without overexhausting one particular area within range. This allows the population of game to stabilize over time.<p>tldr<p>If you're looking for answers, searching at random and searching frequently is probably the most efficient method instead of wasting time figuring out how to find it.<p>"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." -Alan Turing
From NYT<p>> A version of this article appears in print on July 17, 2021, Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: In Tech’s Backyard, the Hottest Search Engine Uses 2 Steel Rods. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe<p>Bold choice, trying to upsell me with a monstrously bullshit headline
This is one reason why I shy away from reading anything posted on substack.<p>It usually lacks any substance, and often - like this post - just says stuff.
Wow, if this isn't a thinly-veiled "Hey guys look at this ha ha can you imagine being fair and impartial and presenting more than one side to this story? Guess we don't have to do it for anything else either!" attempt it makes me cringe.<p>The amount of mental gymnastics I have been seeing around the, uh, "blessing" of hypocrisy has been Olympian. "Whataboutism," "both-sidesism," and so on. Make no mistake, the author has zero interest in dowsing as a topic, it's just the camel's nose in the tent to get you used to the idea that only one side need be represented in a story.
Yes, water dowsing is bullshit, and that has broad consensus. So, the author uses that to basically make the argument that journalism should no longer be objective (the current prevailing trend amongst journalists, it seems), and to report only the "truth" that the reporter believes in. This is why "journalism" is crap nowadays, and why so many people have lost faith in it. Because, writing about Covid's possible lab leak, or wondering about the new vaccines are really similar to writing about water dowsing, right?<p>It's classic Strawman arguing (and even has a Trump reference for a bonus point).
I met a dowser as a teenager on a school trip. He gave us pairs of L-shaped metal rods held loosely in plastic holders. We walked round an ancient stone circle. Every so often the rods would just swing sideways to face left and right. He said those were the ley lines. I was quite impressed. Anyone want to debunk this?