Blue Mountain
Resident Skeptical Hobbit
SaskMick, please consider this:
Sounds hyperbolic? Sadly, not so. Over the last decade a couple of con artists in Britain were selling fake bomb detection devices they called the ADE 651. They were sold to the military and police in many trouble spots around the world, most noteably Iraq, Mexico, and Thailand, and they're still being used there today. There's a long running thread here on the forum about it: Get involved detecting the ADE 651 detector / Jim McCormick arrested
The detectors use the exact same ideomotor effect that fools dowsers into thinking they can find water. The problem is they simply cannot, and do not, work. And when they fail to work, bombs go undetected and end up killing people.
Yet many people believe fully they do work. Why is that? Because they failed to perform the same type of blinded tests that we're proposing you do here. And they failed to perform those tests because they were unaware of them, of how they work, and of why they're so important.
A properly blinded test would prove straight away these detectors do not work. Were they done at the time the device was first proposed for purchase, the people doing the tests would reject it as useless because they were not already wedded to the idea they could detect bombs with them.
One accepted as true, a mistaken belief is very difficult to shake. It's why we here as skeptics put so much emphasis on testing claims and validating them. Because when people fail to do that they can get trapped by mistaken beliefs. Some, like dowsing, are relatively harmless. Others, like fake bomb detectors, fake cancer cures, and fake psychic mediums, can rob people of their money and occasionally their lives.
- Believing in dowsing, in and of itself, is rather harmless
- Not understanding why dowsing doesn't work can kill people, and is killing people today
Sounds hyperbolic? Sadly, not so. Over the last decade a couple of con artists in Britain were selling fake bomb detection devices they called the ADE 651. They were sold to the military and police in many trouble spots around the world, most noteably Iraq, Mexico, and Thailand, and they're still being used there today. There's a long running thread here on the forum about it: Get involved detecting the ADE 651 detector / Jim McCormick arrested
The detectors use the exact same ideomotor effect that fools dowsers into thinking they can find water. The problem is they simply cannot, and do not, work. And when they fail to work, bombs go undetected and end up killing people.
Yet many people believe fully they do work. Why is that? Because they failed to perform the same type of blinded tests that we're proposing you do here. And they failed to perform those tests because they were unaware of them, of how they work, and of why they're so important.
A properly blinded test would prove straight away these detectors do not work. Were they done at the time the device was first proposed for purchase, the people doing the tests would reject it as useless because they were not already wedded to the idea they could detect bombs with them.
One accepted as true, a mistaken belief is very difficult to shake. It's why we here as skeptics put so much emphasis on testing claims and validating them. Because when people fail to do that they can get trapped by mistaken beliefs. Some, like dowsing, are relatively harmless. Others, like fake bomb detectors, fake cancer cures, and fake psychic mediums, can rob people of their money and occasionally their lives.
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That's just one example, we tried other things too.