• SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I know a utility locator that swears by it and demonstrate it. It worked for them, not me. My powers of skepticism kept the witchcraft at bay.

    • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I have had just the MOST frustrating conversations with people I know to be incredibly intelligent lol.

      Im normally very live and live. Like so long as your not convincing/have been convinced to go for reki as a substitute for cancer treatment… Whatever makes you happy. You feel happier holding a quartz rock? Then technically it is working, cool rocks make me happy to, you do you.

      I have no idea why dowsing just gets under my skin lol.

      • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
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        6 months ago

        It’s the difference between “this (placebo) makes me feel better” vs “this is real factual (magic)”.

        One is a lie they tell themselves, the other is a lie they tell you.

      • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        It was pvc and they only locate power and other cables, so it’s not like we had any confirmation. I stay skeptical.

      • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        No, people swear by this, honestly. It’s not like asking someone for a “left handed smoke shifter” as an initiation right. People rural and metro genuinely think this is a real thing. At a few hundred a pop I would wager there’s ~$50k in these things that will be purches by various contractors out of the new infrastructure build in the US. It’s wild.

    • psud@aussie.zone
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      6 months ago

      Good dowsers have pretty well developed skills at spotting signs of underground water, and a good understanding of where civil engineers put pipes

      • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Lol, that’s actually what I’ve read. In cases was someone was enough an “old timer” it’s likley they’d been to the site before, or had worked enough or had enough intuition. In those cases the chi squared was decent with the rods compared without.

        … In a new site built specifically for testing, not so much.

        So that’s interesting from a psychology perspective, something giving someone “permission” to focus, but water divining it was not.

        • psud@aussie.zone
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          6 months ago

          Yep. Good dowsers do terribly at tests where water pipes and empty pipes have been run through a test area at random.

    • dan1101@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      I tried it once and it was a neat experience. I could feel some sort of force crossing the rods as I slowly walked along. Almost felt like horizontal gravity.