arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
Reminds me of the dowser who claimed an 80% success rate. When asked why 80%, he replied "well, there's water under about 80% of the land in this area".
Ed Dowsing claims
- Thread starter arthwollipot
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I have been very successful in my dowsing enterprise...but only with those who are emotionally invested.
Success always requires investment of some sort.
gmanontario
Muse
I worked in the hydrology field for ~20 years and dealt with plenty of dowsers. I challenged them regularly to find a dry hole. Here in Southern Ontario it's near impossible to not find water. Nobody took the challenge.
Some idiots took the dowsers word over the hydrogeologists recommendation and had to redrill at their own expense. Those people actually believed that the guy found a fast flowing underground river. Utter stupidity in a moraine area but I still got paid.
arthwollipot
Observer of Phenomena, Pronouns: he/him
It also requires that you already know where the water is.
There have been many, many tests of dowsing. When the dowser knows where the water is, the success rate is 100%. When they don't, the success rate is no different from chance.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
This is an indictment, not an endorsement.
Of course. I mean, who is dowsing on dry land?
Gord_in_Toronto
Penultimate Amazing
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People looking for water?
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
People pretending they can find water and failing miserably.
Personally, I have the best success in marshy areas.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
You actually make a living off of people paying you to find water in places where water is literally pooling on the ground?
Don't you feel the least bit guilty, taking money from people who are both desperate and incredibly stupid? Have you spent so much time fleecing them that you've come to think that everyone you meet is that stupid?
And when I say "incredibly stupid", I mean that literally. I don't believe anyone is that stupid. Which sets off a chain reaction of disbelief. I don't believe you've dowsed a single water source in your entire life. Not for money, anyway.
Of course I haven't.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
Sorry Warp12, you have once again fallen foul of the fact that we get posters here who really would claim something as daft as that.
It is unfortunate. But, on the plus side, I am learning a lot about the relationship between critical thought and skepticism. Admittedly, the control group is rather small, however.
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RecoveringYuppy
Penultimate Amazing
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Yeah, similar experience here, they pick the number to believable. I ran in to dowsers who claimed an 80% success rate in an area where 95+ would be due to chance. If their claim was true it would mean that dowsing was successful, but they'd be successfully avoiding water.
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
At a place I worked at long ago (a community of largish households) the people running it were very pro-dowser, and because they regularly needed new water sources they hired dowsers. For one well, they managed to get a bad hole in the edge of a swamp. The flow was surprisingly poor, and unsurprisingly murky, requiring that the entire system it fed into be chlorinated. For another they drilled and drilled, hitting a rock ledge that took days to get through, before the drill broke through, losing its very expensive rock head forever. The only up side of that was that it fell into a pool of water. Full of sulphur, but at least it was wet.
But faith is faith, and some people's answer to dowsing failures is to hire a different dowser.
But faith is faith, and some people's answer to dowsing failures is to hire a different dowser.
Some years ago, this would have blown my mind. But, after spending a lot of time on social media, I am not surprised.
gmanontario
Muse
We had dowsers hit a good flow occasionally but most of the time the water was not potable due to the composition of the soil. It tasted like iron and/or Sulphur. The engineer would go deeper underground until good water was found. Dowser claimed success.
A dowser in Sudbury ontario was present at a drill site for the town water supply. He claimed up and down water was where he said it was when the engineers decided elsewhere after some small test bores and using geological maps. His site turned up nothing down to 500 feet in the test hole. That hole was coincidentally where he said there's plenty of water. Eventually they went down to between 795 and 1100 feet to get the required flow at the site the engineers chose. The wells were 18 inch cases too so they wanted a LOT of water. Dowser made a complaint with my company name included to town council about how he was ignored and his reputation was sullied.
Lastly since I know water can be found everywhere here, I used to ask dowsers what the flow would be and how deep? Their answer? Enough and that summed up their vagueness. Oh and one claimed to have found a fast moving underground river in the moraine section of Southern Ontario. I nodded my head and moved on.