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Comment by allears | Hacker News Reader

This isn't science, it's business. Are the companies able to find leaks via dowsing? Does it work quickly and efficiently? If so, there's no reason to stop using it.

Science can speculate that it's all a hoax, that there's no scientific basis, etc., but if it works, it's hard to argue with that.

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It doesn't work though, that's the point. It's often difficult to convince people that something they have been doing for a long time doesn't work.

I think that depends on how you're approaching the question. If you pay someone with 40 years of experience that happens to use dowsing rods to find a leak you'll probably get better results than someone off the street. From a business perspective, it might be entirely reasonable to hire someone that uses dousing rods.

If you're hiring someone with 40 years of experience who happens to use dowsing rods and you believe the dowsing rod is a relevant factor in their success, you need to be fired immediately.

> and you believe the dowsing rod is a relevant factor in their success

You added this part..

> it might be entirely reasonable to hire someone that uses dousing rods.

It's implied here.

I don't think that implies the dosing rods themselves are what works. It may be reasonable to hire somebody who uses dowsing rods, if they have a lot of experience and can therefore make educated guesses about where the water is.

The dowsing rods are just a prop, maybe a psychological crutch that allows the dowser to listen to their gut. But the point is that somebody using a dowsing rod might be good at finding water even though dowsing rods don't work, and therefore it may be entirely reasonable to hire somebody that [incidentally] uses dowsing rods.

This was my point. Thanks for expanding it. It may be the case that using rods work, not because they point to water themselves but because they add something else to the process. Maybe they make people pay attention to their surroundings or something like that. Maybe all the people that operate them are part of a trade group that facilitates the transfer of other very valuable knowledge.

It was not my implication. My point was to differentiate output from methods and knowledge

The only relevant factor in the dowser's success is on the long term for every $100 you give the experienced old dowser he will save you $1000 of expensive diesel excavator time. Technically he can probably stay in business providing as little as $103 of value, but it's probably a lot more.

The sophistry is the continuous goalpost changing; the dowser can be proven to not have x-ray vision. So? The dowser can be proven to not "sniff" buried water bottles. So? People who have a proven ability to not make money in the field as a dowser, when tested for dowsing abilities, results show they are very bad at it (LOL, this is the funniest). Or in this example, well we've proven rods don't do anything, so ... so what?

No one can prove that giving the experienced old guy $100 does not result, in the long run, on saving $1000 of excavator time. I'd keep giving the old guy $100 LOL as I'm not running a charity.

Just because you can't replace or even usefully study management skill or artistic ability or technical "hunches" doesn't mean they don't exist, as clearly they're economically viable.

If you could demonstrate it worked, that's an experiment. If most people agree the experiment is testing for the right thing, that's peer review. If a bunch of people all conduct the experiment, get the same result, and come to the same conclusion, that's science. If it's speculation, it's not science.

So either you're saying the majority of people who have conducted this experiment did it wrong, or that the methodology used by companies is testing for the wrong thing but just happens to be profitable. Given how low tech and quick the experiment is, and thus how widespread the testing has been for over a century, the latter is the most likely case.

What if it’s not working any better than blind luck but the water companies are using it anyway?

What if it’s actually a form of fraud disguised by the woo woo effect of saying it’s dowsing?

If I were a shareholder in one of these water companies I’d want some answers and some concrete stats.

I read an article over here about how even though lemon juice was known to prevent scurvy. But cost cutting led to the use of lime (which has less vitamin c) or processed the lemon juice in such a way to destroy the vitamin c.

Point is, something may seem to work, but if you aren't being scientific in your approach you aren't going to compare to something that actually works and discover your mistake.

> Science can speculate

That's now how science works to find out if something works.

Spoiler: it doesn’t work.

Spoiler: it totally works

And I have a dragon in my garage.

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