VVater VVitches
November 22, 2017 4:11 AM   Subscribe

A science blogger asked UK water companies if they still used the ancient 'art' of water divining / dowsing ... and the answer was yes, mostly. Since the story broke the companies have backtracked somewhat - it's not official policy but it still goes on.
posted by fearfulsymmetry (98 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Dowsing seems to be one of those stubborn superstitions that are hard to shake. In the UK we also have a bizarre situation where the NHS has only just decided that maybe homeopathy is a waste of resources.
posted by pipeski at 4:18 AM on November 22, 2017 [9 favorites]


I was just writing on a post on this topic! I've been enjoying watching videos of dowsers failing in controlled tests. Anglian Water are also trying to push their use of more advanced technology. It's pretty disappointing that this is still believed within the world of water companies.
posted by Stark at 4:23 AM on November 22, 2017 [7 favorites]


Reading comments on various articles there may be a measure of water engineers basically taking the piss and fooling gullible customers/random spectators.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:30 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Reading comments on various articles there may be a measure of water engineers basically taking the piss and fooling gullible customers/random spectators.

Sounds like somebody's browsing for a dowsing
posted by thelonius at 4:34 AM on November 22, 2017 [30 favorites]


This post title is pure genius. And probably epony-something-or-other.
posted by solotoro at 4:35 AM on November 22, 2017 [5 favorites]


The weird thing is when I was a kid I was well into paranormal stuff... and I made a set of dowsing rods after watching a tv program - a couple of empty biro barrels and some coathanger wire bent into 'L' shapes... and it worked! They would definitely cross when you walked over a big metal object (distinctly remember doing it with a big candle holder / candelabra we had)... but of course it's down to the Ideomotor effect (well I say that to appear not mad, obviously I've totally got magic powers)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:37 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's pretty disappointing that this is still believed within the world of water companies.

It at least answers Zevon's question in The French Inhaler":
Where will you go?/With your scarves and your miracles?
posted by thelonius at 4:39 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


They would definitely cross when you walked over a big metal object

I thought they were supposed to detect water, not metal? The latter is a pretty useless ability anyway, what with metal detectors being a thing...
posted by Dysk at 4:43 AM on November 22, 2017


Sounds like somebody's browsing for a dowsing

Pining for a divining
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:47 AM on November 22, 2017 [21 favorites]


what with metal detectors being a thing...

Metal detectors only go down a couple of feet... they've got nothing on magic sticks!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:53 AM on November 22, 2017 [7 favorites]


I think it's both hilarious and sad, the way so-called skeptics fall over themselves to dump a bucket on these people without ever checking how their actual success rate in the field compares to that of their non-dowsing colleagues.

We all know that dowsing works because ideomotor. But that's really not any more interesting than knowing that a metal detector works because batteries.

Intuition is a powerful and useful facility, and the ideomotor effect is a very cheap and effective way to get intuition to sit in the driving seat. If somebody is skilled enough at tapping an intuition trained on thousands of water-finding expeditions to have a reputation for success, why does it make sense to call them deluded or a charlatan purely because it's them, not their little sticks and wires, finding good spots to sink bores? Contrary to the unexamined assumptions of most of the self-styled skeptics I've met, my local farmers are not stupider than they are.

If I'm going to state with confidence that any given dowser is not worth the money they're paid, I want to see data about their success rate at doing what people usually pay them for in the region where they usually work compared with that of non-dowsers offering similar services for similar rates in the same region. It's by no means a given that expensive modern electronics will yield useful improvements over a good intuitive feel for local landforms when it comes to working out where the accessible underground water is at.

Any doofus can claim to be a dowser. It does not follow that every dowser is a doofus.
posted by flabdablet at 5:38 AM on November 22, 2017 [40 favorites]


In the UK we also have a bizarre situation where the NHS has only just decided that maybe homeopathy is a waste of resources.

I wonder how long into the reign of Charles III that decision will last.
posted by acb at 5:39 AM on November 22, 2017 [6 favorites]


Water dowsing is still a thing here, and dowsers are brought out all the time for locating buried irrigation main lines and identifying locations to put in wells. The farmers and irrigation companies all swear by it, but I suspect that the good dowsers are actually reading subtle landscape clues (maybe unconsciously) that hint at old excavations and groundwater nearer the surface, which could give you a very good success rate.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:44 AM on November 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


When I was a young'n I'd argue anything at all science based or anti-psychic but even at my most precociously arrogant moments I would not have considered challenging my grandmothers claims to witching wells. She had an excellent record at choosing drilling spots. Required a branch from a specific type of tree which I do not recall.
posted by sammyo at 5:45 AM on November 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


Reading comments on various articles there may be a measure of water engineers basically taking the piss and fooling gullible customers/random spectators.

Apparently the oft-recounted factoid about roads in Iceland being diverted to save rocks which are the homes of invisible elves is really something like this; there was some sort of (completely mundane, non-elfin) local environmental dispute somewhere in Iceland once, one of the sides mentioned folkloric elves as a rhetorical device, and now everybody knows that the elf lobby has a veto over construction in Iceland.
posted by acb at 5:45 AM on November 22, 2017 [8 favorites]


Any doofus can claim to be a dowser. It does not follow that every dowser is a doofus.

This then falls into the category of what we call fraud, no? Like when my uncle starts wading round tasting the water in different parts of the fjord, before getting his shrimp net out be scraping up a full net every time, leading city slicker tourists to think he can taste where the shrimp are. Bollocks he can. He knows where they are from years, decades of experience, and he likes to take the piss.
posted by Dysk at 5:45 AM on November 22, 2017 [19 favorites]


Required a branch from a specific type of tree which I do not recall.

Willow or Peach

But really, any green branch will do in a pinch
posted by slipthought at 5:46 AM on November 22, 2017


> NHS has only just decided that maybe homeopathy is a waste of resources

I'm curious about the Metafilter opinion on the NHS funding homaeopathy. Obviously it's quackery, but on the other hand I imagine it's a pretty cheap way of fixing up people who just need recovery time and a placebo. Apologies if this is well-trodden ground.
posted by katrielalex at 5:49 AM on November 22, 2017


I suspect the water companies’ PR departments just read the enquiry the wrong way at first and detected brownie points in the wrong location.
posted by Segundus at 5:53 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


It's cheap enough that the people who believe in it (and that's kinda necessary for the placebo effect) can enrich fraudsters with their personal money, not NHS funds. It's also never cheap enough to justify - it's just water, and no homeopathy provider is price competitive with, say, Severn Trent.
posted by Dysk at 5:54 AM on November 22, 2017 [7 favorites]


I imagine it's a pretty cheap way of fixing up people who just need recovery time and a placebo.

I've thought the same thing.
Doctors aren't allowed to issue placebos, but quite often placebos are the most helpful medicine.

So if there was something like homeopathy that they could prescribe (knowing fully that it were cheap sugar pills) it would mean fewer prescription of antibiotics, which I'd bet are often given out basically as a "do something measure"

I've long wondered about the ethics and legality of producing a double wrapped medicine, where the outside says it's placebo and the inside is the most medically looking box of sugar pills.
There has even been research into what colours and shapes of placebo are more effective at healing various things, so you could legally have on the inner package scientific claims of effectiveness.

...anyway, sorry.. dowsing
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 5:57 AM on November 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's also never cheap enough to justify - it's just water, and no homeopathy provider is price competitive with, say, Severn Trent.

Given how, under the Tories, the NHS is becoming just a kitemark on a network of private service providers, perhaps Severn Trent should be accredited as a provider of homeopathic remedies, and allowed to use the NHS logo on their marketing materials.
posted by acb at 5:57 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


I’m happy with homeopathy so long as the number of patients who receive it is first diluted millions of times to the point where annual usage by the NHS typically doesn’t contain a single actual prescription.
posted by Segundus at 5:58 AM on November 22, 2017 [22 favorites]


People.... dowsing!
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 6:00 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Intuition is a powerful and useful facility, and the ideomotor effect is a very cheap and effective way to get intuition to sit in the driving seat.

If you need two sticks to tap into your intuition, why not use real instruments that can verify your intuition ?
posted by Pendragon at 6:01 AM on November 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


I've seen dowsing in California. Here's a couple terrible shots (see the metal wire in his hand) I snapped on the sly of the water company dowsing in Livermore.
posted by lamp at 6:02 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Pretending we're doing magic gives us the psychological license to use our intuitions, since our culture doesn't really have a very good handle on the fundamental importance, reality, and value of intuitive modes of reasoning, but I'd be shocked if there's anything more than that involved. I might buy the magnetic field arguments if not for the fact the success rate of dowsers seems to be independent of whether they actually use rods or just walk around intuiting things.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:06 AM on November 22, 2017 [5 favorites]


Hey, you can use these to find a lot more than just water!
posted by Naberius at 6:08 AM on November 22, 2017


If you need two sticks to tap into your intuition, why not use real instruments that can verify your intuition ?

Cost/benefit analysis.
posted by flabdablet at 6:09 AM on November 22, 2017


"That leaves 62.4 million people or 98% of the population of Great Britain paying for a service that does not work."

Yet they somehow have water in their taps. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe it's pretty easy for an experienced worker to find water underground, even without scientific equipment.
posted by mdash at 6:15 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


but I suspect that the good dowsers are actually reading subtle landscape clues (maybe unconsciously) that hint at old excavations and groundwater nearer the surface, which could give you a very good success rate.

I had this experience retrospectively at the beginning of the year. My small community garden organization was going to clear a plot of land to make space for more allotments, and because there was so much rubble and construction debris on the surface, we ended up having to take off about 2 feet of topsoil. We uncovered a groundwater deposit near the surface (or tapped a spring, or punctured the aquifer or something), which we dammed up and now forms a cute little pond which has water 11 out of 12 months of the year. After the water started welling up, we were all like, "ohhhh yeah, so that's why there was always something green on that spot, even in August when the rest of the lot was dead, brown scrub." A good dowser would have consciously or unconsciously made the connection, and voila! Dig your well here.
posted by lollymccatburglar at 6:22 AM on November 22, 2017 [7 favorites]


My parents' neighbours had a man come out to dowse for where to put their well, the dowser claimed a lot of success, he always found water, and lo and behold the neighbour's well has water, everyone was suitably impressed...until my Dad pointed out that you could drill literally anywhere and hit water in the township. Everybody in the area had wells tapping into the same formation, and most of them situated their wells based on convenience and how they wanted to lay-out their lots, not magic sticks.

That ruined the magic for me.
posted by selenized at 6:27 AM on November 22, 2017 [5 favorites]


I'm generally convinced that humans are mostly kind and smart and their continued existence is a good thing. Then I read articles like this and have to reconsider that opinion.

Believing batshit crazy nonsense in a religious context with no actual consequence is arguably harmless. People in authority making real decisions based upon such ideas is truly awful. We really need to do a better job teaching people in non-majors college science classes the value of controlled experiments.
posted by eotvos at 6:28 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


People in authority making real decisions based upon such ideas is truly awful.

Frankly, I'm not convinced there's much of a validity difference between a typical dowser's beliefs about dowsing and a a typical economist's beliefs about the economy, so I shall reserve my outrage for those among the consulting fraternity whose foolish superstitions cost us collectively billions to trillions, not tens to hundreds of thousands.
posted by flabdablet at 6:40 AM on November 22, 2017 [18 favorites]


I'm curious about the Metafilter opinion on the NHS funding homaeopathy. Obviously it's quackery, but on the other hand I imagine it's a pretty cheap way of fixing up people who just need recovery time and a placebo. Apologies if this is well-trodden ground.

It is never, ever okay to lie to people about their healthcare. If what a person really needs is lied to, what they require is to have their need to be lied to addressed, not to be lied to.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:44 AM on November 22, 2017 [9 favorites]


The previous post is...Pointy Water?

From Pointy Water to Water Pointy
posted by museum of fire ants at 6:45 AM on November 22, 2017 [12 favorites]


And if you really think that the Medium piece linked in the OP has an important point to make about the validity or otherwise of water dowsing, then perhaps you can explain why, in this paragraph,
Every properly conducted scientific test of water dowsing has found it no better than chance (e.g. here, here, and here, nicely described here). You’ll be just as likely to find water by going out and taking a good guess as you will by walking around with divining rods. And it’s not for lack of testing; there was even $1 million up for grabs for anyone who could provide rigorous evidence that you can find water using dowsing techniques.
the first link offered as an example of "every properly conducted scientific test of water dowsing" is to a study about homeopaths detecting homeopathic medicines by dowsing, which is not water dowsing in anything like the sense that the water company technicians are supposedly doing it; the second is to an article about grave dowsing, which is not water dowsing at all; and the third and fourth links pertain to a study whose experimental design gives it almost nothing in common with the typical location task that a person dowsing for pipework within a structure would commonly face.

The reader's attention is directed so strongly toward the trivially easy task of demonstrating that dowsing is an example of the ideomotor effect that the entirely questionable assertion that "You’ll be just as likely to find water by going out and taking a good guess as you will by walking around with divining rods" - an assertion supported by none of the tests offered in the same paragraph where it occurs - just slips in as a given.

This is no more a skeptical piece than dowsing rods are earth ray detectors.

If this is quality science journalism then dowsers weigh the same as duck, which means they're made of wood, and therefore: a witch! Burn them!
posted by flabdablet at 7:01 AM on November 22, 2017 [8 favorites]


I am confused.

I would expect a water utility to already know where the water is, given that they will need a large source of water and they will control a treatment plant and a series of pipes.

On a rainy island like Britain, do municipal water authorities really have to go looking for more water? How thirsty are you people?
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:10 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


The utilities are looking for their pipes.
posted by spork at 7:26 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


The Guardian article also notes It is regarded as a pseudoscience, after numerous studies showed it was no better than chance at finding water. I'm flabbergasted at the criticism of "so-called skeptics fall over themselves to dump a bucket". First of all I'm happy to just be a skeptic, thank you, no so-called about it. Second of all: dowsing does not work. If you want to believe in magical intuitive techniques the onus is on the dowser enthusiast to prove it works. No one has, anecdata aside. Reading between the lines on these articles the real complaint is the water companies are billing people for access to their magic. It's exactly like the NHS paying for homeopathy, a waste of money.

I'm curious about this modern spin on dowsing though. Traditional dowsing is a Y-shaped branch of flexible wood when you use to find underground water, a place to dig a well. Willow witching. This article talks about two metal rods used to find a water pipe. That seems like a pretty significant deviation from medieval tradition. Are they tracing only metal pipes? Or plastic and clay too, the water in the pipe? Is this some 19th century innovation in response to the discovery of magnetism?

The time I had to trace a pipe I really did hire a dowser. Only aided with a radio transmitter placed and snaked through the pipe, then traced above ground with a receiver. It's a pretty standard rig for sewer and drain pipes and works pretty well.
posted by Nelson at 7:30 AM on November 22, 2017 [9 favorites]


Here in NYC, there are several defunct utility companies with buried gas, water, steampipe, electrical, and telephone and telegraph lines. And _no_ central planning authority with a map of them _all_. So, we go straight to the paranormal. Some years ago, the telephone company admitted they have people to dowse before they dig.
posted by bunky at 7:34 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Short story time.

It is common here to call the utilities before you do any digging. Because it never works out well for anyone if you hit an underground line.

I know where my lines are. But I had to do some digging, so for liability reasons I wanted everything marked.

When the natural gas guy came out, he initially had a hard time locating the line. He told me that if he couldn't find it, he would use a secret method of finding it. Yes, it was dowsing. He even showed me how it works. I was pretty much too shocked to say anything. It was one of those moments in life where you have to say to yourself that yes, this is actually happening, and no, it makes no sense whatsoever. Followed by a lot of WTF after he left.

This might be why fiber lines get cut so often. Apparently you can't dowse for light.
posted by bh at 7:36 AM on November 22, 2017 [10 favorites]


I'm pretty darn skeptical but I find this delightful, actually. Everything is shit, but some people still believe in magic. It's kind of sweet. I mean, yeah, public utility, please use science, but ... magic!
posted by sldownard at 7:45 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Whatever the shortcomings of the a Medium piece, there have indeed been many studies showing dowsing of all kinds doesn't work. Wikipedia has a very incomplete list.
posted by Dysk at 7:54 AM on November 22, 2017 [5 favorites]


On a rainy island like Britain, do municipal water authorities really have to go looking for more water?

Somewhat surprisingly, the South East of England is officially classed as semi-arid, so is often short of water. It doesn't help that they use way above average in the region.
posted by biffa at 8:05 AM on November 22, 2017


I was watching a show with my dad last night where people build houses in the middle of nowhere. They had a dowser come out to help a guy drill a well for his mountain shack, and made a big deal of it, but never really brought up the well drilling later. Except, obliquely, when the guy said "I've had a set-back getting a fresh water well drilled, but otherwise everything is going great!"

The idea that dowsing is a way to justify folk-knowledge is an interesting one. Are there any other similar practices that exist into the modern day? Maybe Feng-Shui using ideas of spirits to cover up basic elements of environment design?
posted by codacorolla at 8:07 AM on November 22, 2017


How thirsty are you people?

Mine's a pint, thanks.
posted by Segundus at 8:15 AM on November 22, 2017 [6 favorites]


It's a good thing I don't believe in dowsing, since I'd probably embarrass myself by showing up with a forked stick when apparently the modern technique is wiggly pieces of wire.
posted by ckape at 9:25 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Even a rainy island like Britain has population growth. Even if it didn’t, you’ve got 65 million people in an area the size of Michigan. Nobody gets that much rain.
posted by Autumnheart at 9:59 AM on November 22, 2017


Whatever the shortcomings of the a Medium piece, there have indeed been many studies showing dowsing of all kinds doesn't work. Wikipedia has a very incomplete list.

In science, one needs to be very careful and specific about the question being asked. Near as I can tell, in all the studies listed, the question is "Is a stick better than chance at finding some water we put somewhere through not presently explained means?" Whereas the question people here are asking is "Can sufficiently experienced humans' intuition (mediated via some silly stick or whatever) better than chance at finding naturally occurring sources of water in a natural environment?" possibly with the corollary question of "Does using human intuition in addition to standard techniques increase the chance of finding a naturally occurring water source in a natural environment?"

The first question is the one you want if you want to know whether supernatural powers exist. The second questions are what you want to know if you are interested in finding water.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:03 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Sounds like somebody's browsing for a dowsing

Pining for a divining


Itching for a witching
posted by rube goldberg at 10:05 AM on November 22, 2017 [7 favorites]


If it's just human intuition, you could just ditch the silly sticks and look a lot more credible as a consequence.
posted by Dysk at 10:05 AM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


The second questions are what you want to know if you are interested in finding water.

That's what the test that flabdablet trashes shows - that dowsing doesn't find water at all better than random chance.

(....this link pertains) to a study whose experimental design gives it almost nothing in common with the typical location task that a person dowsing for pipework within a structure would commonly face.

how so? there was flowing water, in a pipe, under some solid object. the job was to find the pipe.

was the pipe too far away? was the blocking material wrong? was the fact it was in a barn? what are the confounding variables that mess with dowsing vis a vis intuition?
posted by lalochezia at 10:11 AM on November 22, 2017


A public utility dowsing for water is one thing. The fact that Iraqi military were using an overpriced dowsing rod to search for explosives until just last year (three years after the manufacturer was convicted of fraud!) really drives home just how attached we humans can be to magical thinking.
posted by Uncle Ira at 10:12 AM on November 22, 2017 [10 favorites]


The idea of mediating intuition through a set of arbitrary rules made me think of the following quote about astrology which I thought was from Dirk Gently (which of course, would fit, because the idea of seemingly unconnected phenomena having a logical underpinning is very Dirk Gently) but was in fact from Mostly Harmless.


“I know that astrology isn’t a science,’ said Gail. “Of course it isn’t. It’s just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or, what’s that strange thing you British play?’

“Er, cricket? Self-loathing?”


“Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don’t make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It’s just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It’s like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that’s now been taken away and hidden. The graphite’s not important. It’s just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology’s nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just to do with people thinking about people.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 10:13 AM on November 22, 2017 [8 favorites]


The Guardian article also notes It is regarded as a pseudoscience, after numerous studies showed it was no better than chance at finding water.

It then fails to cite any such study. The only study links in the Guardian article are the ones from the Medium piece, which are either inapplicable or flawed as mentioned above.

Look, I get that people who believe that dowsing works by some supernatural means are wrong and annoying. If it does work, it's only ever going to be the pattern recognition skills of the dowsers that lift its success rate above chance, regardless of what the dowsers think their rods or sticks are doing.

But from the undoubted fact that anybody who claims that dowsing works by magic is wrong, it does not follow that a randomly selected member of the public would be expected to match the water location success rate of a practised dowser in cases where the expensive electronics is inapplicable for whatever reason.

I'm skeptical enough to want to see that tested before applying the wire brush and Dettol treatment to organizations that have been functioning cost-effectively for years.

The world is full of people who are just better at their jobs than many who wish to stamp out pseudosciences they don't personally enjoy ever give them credit for. And as mentioned above, the pseudoscience of economics is responsible for far more needless suffering than the mostly harmless pseudoscience of dowsing. Leave the poor bloody dowsers alone and put Arthur bloody Laffer out of work.
posted by flabdablet at 10:25 AM on November 22, 2017 [9 favorites]


how so? there was flowing water, in a pipe, under some solid object. the job was to find the pipe.

...a pipe that, most of the time, was nowhere near the place where anybody who has ever plumbed an actual building would have put a pipe.

If dowsing works at all, it works by pattern matching. All the experiment you seem so fond of showed is that dowsing doesn't work by detecting the actual water; and that is something that only a dowser could disagree with.
posted by flabdablet at 10:29 AM on November 22, 2017


If it's just human intuition, you could just ditch the silly sticks and look a lot more credible as a consequence.

And if you care more about finding good spots to bore for water than you do about looking credible to people passionately devoted to Not Being Wrong On The Internet, you'll keep using whatever cheap props have helped you get reliable access to your subconscious evaluation of landforms and buildings for most of your career.
posted by flabdablet at 10:39 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


how so? there was flowing water, in a pipe, under some solid object. the job was to find the pipe.

was the pipe too far away? was the blocking material wrong? was the fact it was in a barn? what are the confounding variables that mess with dowsing vis a vis intuition?


I am making the assumption that a utility's job is to find naturally occurring sources of water in a natural environment that they can drill a well to. The natural environment is likely to have all sorts of cues in the geology and plant life as to where sources of water might be.

An engineered level field with sealed pipes placed under it is an entirely different matter an one with which human intuition can be expected to provide little aid.

If it's just human intuition, you could just ditch the silly sticks and look a lot more credible as a consequence.

If it makes no difference whether one has a stick or not, I could somewhat cheekily argue that the belief that one shouldn't have a stick is just as superstitious as the belief that one should.

On a more serious note, I think it's very important to understand science and rationality as a method, not as a set of outcomes that look "scientific." In this case, flabdablet started off this whole argument by stating what a rational method for determining whether a given person is effective at their job: finding natural water sources for a public utility. The arguments that we should be biased against dowsing are more heuristic in nature. In fact, if no one is paying attention to the relative effectiveness of people and methods, then there is no evidence that even methods based on our scientific understanding are anything more than superstition either. Theory is a great start, but it is not very accurate without experimental verification.

Now, to be fair, I expect that modern hydrology is more effective than intuition, mediated by dowsing or otherwise, but without any evidence, this is also just an intuitive hunch, and us no more credible than waving a stick about and declaring I have found the right answer.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:40 AM on November 22, 2017 [4 favorites]


It's still commonly used here in sceptical NZ. I recently saw an agriculture uni class being run through the paces to see if anyone had the touch.

Intuition (if that's what it is) is a funny thing; scepticism stops us moderns from seeing much of our world at all. I still feel we haven't yet plumbed the extents of our real universe. Anything that can't be seen in a lab is often written off as magic or flawed thinking or worse.
posted by unearthed at 10:47 AM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


I am making the assumption that a utility's job is to find naturally occurring sources of water in a natural environment that they can drill a well to.

This will at best rarely be the case for the utilities in question. What's under discussion is engineers (in UK parlance; technicians in the rest of the world) locating existing water pipes.
posted by Dysk at 10:54 AM on November 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


(Element missing from this discussion: if you properly document and map your work, you don't face the problem at all in future...)
posted by Dysk at 10:56 AM on November 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


I am willing to consider the idea that dowsing is a means to let people use their intuition and use landscape clues to find water -- but it would still be nice to see some data one way or another about the efficacy of dowsing techniques as used in the field. Does anyone have any studies, one way or another?
posted by crazy with stars at 11:11 AM on November 22, 2017


This will at best rarely be the case for the utilities in question. What's under discussion is engineers (in UK parlance; technicians in the rest of the world) locating existing water pipes.

Fair point. Though flabdablet is right that there can also be clues on where humans would have put a pipe as well where a natural aquifer would have ended up.

Honestly, I'm curious what sort of effectiveness you could get with some sort of machine learning algorithm to identify potential pipe locations based on the surrounding features. I'll bet you could do better than chance. I also would guess that people would have less of a problem with that technique as compared to dowsing, despite the input data being the same or more limited and the actual reasons for achieving the outcome equally inscrutable.
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:12 AM on November 22, 2017


Can you dowse hills to die on?
posted by lucidium at 12:01 PM on November 22, 2017 [5 favorites]


If dowsing works at all, it works by pattern matching

Which pattern though? Are we talking about the "pattern" of finding the best place to dig a well to tap water with your witch-hazel switch? That's traditional dowsing. Or maybe we're talking about the "pattern" of finding a lost water pipe under the grass with some metal rods? That's the quackery the utility companies are paying for. Or maybe it's the third thing Uncle Ira mentioned, the intuitive pattern of finding a buried IED.

Do dowsers specialize? Maybe the wood stick dowsers have magical well intuition and the metal rod ones are pipe whisperers? Perhaps there are special license endorsements depending on whether you intuition is for the water in the pipe or for the pipe itself.

It's all nonsense. I mean being incredibly charitable and saying someone really is good at looking at some landscape and intuiting where someone 80 years ago might have buried a pipe. How about just doing that directly? Why wave some metal sticks around?

Appearing magic sure is great job security though. I know this from years of being good at making computers do things. Always leave 'em with a little razzle dazzle.
posted by Nelson at 12:11 PM on November 22, 2017 [6 favorites]


Come to think of it, isn't Luke Skywalker sort of a Death Star thermal exhaust port dowser? Has anyone thought to check the midichlorian count of Severn Trent's water witches?
posted by Nelson at 12:19 PM on November 22, 2017


My dad and grandfather used to use dowsing rods (bent metal coat hangers) to find underground pipes, tanks, that sort of thing. Always worked for them. It was always a last-ditch sort of thing after digging around and looking for them rationally didn't work.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:25 PM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


And even they agreed it was all a pile of baloney. But it worked.
posted by fimbulvetr at 12:30 PM on November 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


(Element missing from this discussion: if you properly document and map your work, you don't face the problem at all in future...)

Well, as long as the terrain doesn't change - the forest doesn't grow or shrink, the ground doesn't shift with storms or from construction, animals don't put enough holes in the ground that the rainwater finds new paths, and so on.

Maps are good for general-area info, but once they're more than a decade old, they can be useless to figure out if there's a pipe exactly 15 feet from a particular wall.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:39 PM on November 22, 2017


If your water pipes have shifted significantly relative to the foundations they're plumbed into, you have a problem...
posted by Dysk at 2:06 PM on November 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


Dowsers have significantly failed in tests using conditions that they agreed to. They may perform better under other conditions, but if they themselves don't know what those conditions are then their skill is useless.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:33 PM on November 22, 2017 [1 favorite]


Maps are good for general-area info, but once they're more than a decade old, they can be useless to figure out if there's a pipe exactly 15 feet from a particular wall.

This is why you reference your survey to known benchmarks that are likely to be stable/findable over time. But that’s a best case situation, and much of the time there isn’t even a hand drawn as-built plan to go off of. On one project I worked on there was a telecommunications company that didn’t know where their fairly new fiber optic line was, despite have spent however many millions designing and installing it. Good luck locating accurate drawings of water lines put in by some random subcontractor decades ago. And when you are dealing with irrigation lines and other diy work, the only hope is some old guy who remembers the installation, or a dowser who could read the landscape.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:57 PM on November 22, 2017


I would expect a water utility to already know where the water is, given that they will need a large source of water and they will control a treatment plant and a series of pipes.

Where do you think this is, Germany or Switzerland or somewhere?

The British (well, the English at least) like their institutions nice and ad hoc, with nothing nailed down beyond any potentially useful ambiguity. The UK has a constitution, but it is not in one document, but rather in pieces scattered over some two dozen documents written over the centuries. There's the matter of English common law, most of which is based on cases and precedents rather than anything explicitly codified (as is the case in most of the rest of Europe). England's property title system is a mess, with nobody knowing exactly who owns most of the country, and in the rental sector, many houses are subdivided creatively into flats in a way that makes arranging deliveries only marginally easier than in a Nairobi slum. In light of this, could anybody reasonably expect all the country's water pipes, many of which were laid in the Victorian era, and some of which were hastily patched up after World War 2 bombs, to be mapped out somewhere?
posted by acb at 3:33 PM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


The fact that Iraqi military were using an overpriced dowsing rod to search for explosives until just last year

Even better: it was a “novelty golf ball detector”.
posted by acb at 3:34 PM on November 22, 2017


I used to spend a lot of time in the Stecoah Valley. One of the poorest areas in North Carolina and perhaps America as a whole. Not much in town. A goodwill, pizza place, SSI, maybe a WalMart? Certainly an Army recruiter.

Anyway, on the road to HWY 129 is Moe's. Old man Moe had cancer and couldn't move much back then. I'd drop by and we'd trace out a route for my adventures and I'd drive a hideously expensive piece of German machinery into the most shitty and awful routes that can be imagined. At night I'd return and tell him what I had found. Old man Moe loved it and Moe always let me stay for free, even in the dead of winter when she was all closed up.

Anyway, across the street was Tom's Self Storage and Well Drilling. I had lunch with Tom once. Interesting guy. We got to talk about well drilling. I drilled a well in my old man's farm and could talk a good game. Tom eyes lit up. He had been taught dowsing by the local man of the mountain. Dude was a legend, a genius, and a hell of a water witch.

Tom used a hollow aluminum rod and a certain stepping/ankling that allowed the stick to seek the underground water. Mind you, this is a valley 4,000 feet AGL and part of the water shed of the perennially water Smokie Mountains. There is water every effing where.

I asked Tom, how was business? Great! Why he had drilled 3 dry wells that week. Great money! A growth field!

Jeezus. Dude, you can go to the county assayer and buy a hydraulic map and just frigging ask them how deep the water is. They have maps that track the rainfall and tell you where, when, and how deep to drill. No rocket science required. Literally walk up, ask where to drill, and off you go.

No, Tom said, that is not a growth field, can't make any money there. And lo and behold he was right.

Moe's and Tom's are gone now. Pity about Moe's. She was a great lady.

Ah yes, the point. Dowsing doesn't work unless you are the dowser.
posted by pdoege at 7:18 PM on November 22, 2017


But from the undoubted fact that anybody who claims that dowsing works by magic is wrong, it does not follow that a randomly selected member of the public would be expected to match the water location success rate of a practised dowser

Is that...a point that someone in the thread is attempting to argue, or did I just successfully find a pile of straw with my straw dowsing stick? I mean, telepathy is bullshit, but any practised "mindreading" fraudster is going to do better than average at guessing background details about a mark. Would you care to praise them for tapping into their intuition too?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 9:20 PM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


I wonder how many dowsers would say they do their dowsing in an altered state of consciousness, and I'd especially like to know -- most of the dowsers I've heard and read about are men -- if a significant number get spontaneous erections when they're dowsing.
posted by jamjam at 9:52 PM on November 22, 2017 [2 favorites]


Is that...a point that someone in the thread is attempting to argue

It's implicit in the suggestion that these UK water companies ought to stop their employees from using dowsing without first finding out whether their dowsers actually score better than random chance in the field.

I mean being incredibly charitable and saying someone really is good at looking at some landscape and intuiting where someone 80 years ago might have buried a pipe. How about just doing that directly? Why wave some metal sticks around?

If you actually cared about the answer to that question, as opposed to merely swinging it about rhetorically to secure your position as a Respectable Internet Skeptic, you'd design a test to compare the success rate of dowsers performing their customary tasks in their customary conditions with vs. without their weapons of choice.

Any competent Respectable Internet Skeptic should be familiar with cognitive distortions and their effect on reasoning and judgement. It seems plausible to me that the simple go/no-go reading provided by ideomotor-driven dowsing tools could be capable of bypassing some of these distortions enough to improve access to underlying intuitive situational assessments.

So until I see actual data that tells me otherwise, I'm sticking to my line that acting against working dowsers on no better basis than being sure they're wrong about how they do what they claim to do amounts to witch-hunting, not respectable skepticism, and can therefore not be justified.

Dowsers have significantly failed in tests using conditions that they agreed to.

That is consistent with the hypothesis that dowsers who have agreed to those conditions are mistaken about how their self-evaluated dowsing skills actually work. It does not justify banning dowsing as a practice within organizations that have a history of using it.

They may perform better under other conditions, but if they themselves don't know what those conditions are then their skill is useless.

Not only does that not follow, it's demonstrably wrong as a general management principle.
posted by flabdablet at 10:22 PM on November 22, 2017 [3 favorites]


That is consistent with the hypothesis that dowsers who have agreed to those conditions are mistaken about how their self-evaluated dowsing skills actually work. It does not justify banning dowsing as a practice within organizations that have a history of using it.

Ah, only True Dowsers could pass such a test, right.
posted by Pendragon at 10:50 PM on November 22, 2017


McNamara fallacy
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 PM on November 22, 2017


Here is a short film about working dowsers.
posted by flabdablet at 11:16 PM on November 22, 2017


It is never, ever okay to lie to people about their healthcare. If what a person really needs is lied to, what they require is to have their need to be lied to addressed, not to be lied to.

I've got some good news for you then, turns out you don't need to lie in order for placebos to work.
posted by NMcCoy at 2:38 AM on November 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


Last para of NMcCoy's linked article:
At this point, however, “I’m less concerned with the mechanism than with whether or not it actually has a benefit,” Fontaine said. “If it does, then we can try to figure out the mechanism.”
Now there is a proper skeptic.
posted by flabdablet at 3:45 AM on November 23, 2017 [4 favorites]


Thing is, there's nothing to indicate that water company dowsers do work. You're taking it entirely on faith that there's anything there.
posted by Dysk at 3:55 AM on November 23, 2017 [2 favorites]


Also, the kind of test you seem to be agitating for should be both incredibly easy, and utterly worthless.

The water companies have information on their employee performance. It should be easy to do some statistical analysis and show that the dowser-rod-equipped among them are more efficient, if it does in fact help them do their job more effectively.

But a field test would prove little to nothing. You get my uncle into a controlled setting and have him taste the water, he won't be able to tell you where the shrimp are. But do a field test in Limfjorden, and boy will he pass that test with flying colours. It'd be easy to conclude that there is in fact something to it. Only there isn't. He can achieve exactly the same results without tasting the water. The whole water-tasting thing is a show he puts on when there are tourists around, because it amuses him to bamboozle some city folk with weird mystical country ways. It's bollocks - but it'd be easy for the kind of field test you're proposing to show that it's totally valid. We might as well believe that David Copperfield is doing actual magic because hey, it works for him in the field!
posted by Dysk at 4:12 AM on November 23, 2017


The water companies have information on their employee performance. It should be easy to do some statistical analysis and show that the dowser-rod-equipped among them are more efficient, if it does in fact help them do their job more effectively.

My point exactly. It is water company management's job, not that of an army of outraged online pseudoskeptics, to make the call about whether the dowsing rods may or may not continue to be carried in water company trucks.

You get my uncle into a controlled setting and have him taste the water, he won't be able to tell you where the shrimp are. But do a field test in Limfjorden, and boy will he pass that test with flying colours.

Exactly. And if your uncle were being paid from the public purse to catch shrimp for the benefit of the public, then that would be money well spent - despite the froth and fury that would undoubtedly be raised by the We Know Better Because We're Bright brigade after one of them blogged about watching him go through his little water tasting performance.

However, I think there may well be a difference between what your uncle is doing (putting on a show to take the piss out of tourists) and what a dowsing rod equipped water company technician is doing. Given the fairly widespread belief that dowsing actually is a thing, there's a fair chance that at least some of the company technicians are doing it because they think it works better than guessing, not because they're putting on a show for the lulz.

Bear in mind that all the water companies asked about this described dowsing as something that happens "occasionally". It's not like they're routinely using it instead of the more respectable methods. They'll be using it when the respectable methods are, for whatever reason, inapplicable; and they'll be using it because they think it works better than straight-up guesswork.

So it would be at least as interesting as the results of that placebo test linked above to find out if they're right.

I would be interested in seeing the results of a field test that made a serious attempt to quantify success rates of company technicians at finding buried pipes in the field, under whatever conditions would normally prompt those technicians to reach for their dowsing rods, using one the following methods selected at random for each site:

(a) straight-up guesswork, no dowsing tools allowed
(b) record an initial guess and then attempt to either confirm it or generate a better one via dowsing
(c) dowsing

And for each site and dowser tested, I would like to see a randomly selected Internet skeptic with no prior water company experience sent to the same site to repeat the same task by the same method selected by the dowser.

I predict that such a test would show that (1) the company technician's success rate is significantly higher than that of the Internet skeptic regardless of method; (2) the company technician's dowsing result disagrees with their guess more often than the Internet skeptic's when using method (b); (3) the company technican's success rate for methods (b) or (c) is significantly higher than their rate for (a) while for the skeptic they're about the same.

The reason I predict that the dowser will show a different success rate from dowsing vs. straight guesswork is that the process of dowsing, for an experienced dowser who takes the process seriously, is different from the process of wandering about and making deliberate, considered guesses. The dowser will typically be paying far more attention to the dowsing tools than to specific attention-grabbing features of the environment, and this will affect the information that their guesswork is based upon.

The reason I predict that the dowser will show a better success rate than the skeptic is that experienced workers are usually better at their jobs than one-day blow-ins.

And the reason I predict that the dowser will show a better success rate when working in their customary way is that I think company technicians, as a class, are not stupid people and can be generally relied upon to know what works best for them.

Now, you may well disagree with these predictions and the assumptions that underlie them. That's obviously a reasonable position to take; they are, after all based on nothing more than my own prejudices about skilled field workers vs. Dunning-Kruger know-it-all naysayers. But I think you'll have trouble constructing an error-free defence of the position that they are so unreasonable as to make the result of any such test a foregone conclusion.

I also think you'll have trouble constructing an error-free argument that such a test must inevitably show that dowsing performs worse than straight-up guesswork - which would be the only reasonable basis for prohibiting company employees from using it. A couple of bent wires in empty biro cases is scarcely a drain on the Exchequer.
posted by flabdablet at 5:55 AM on November 23, 2017


(...am I the only person who kind of believes in dowsing thanks to the fictional experiences of one Titty Walker?)
posted by huimangm at 6:28 AM on November 23, 2017


The reason I predict that the dowser will show a better success rate than the skeptic is that experienced workers are usually better at their jobs than one-day blow-ins.

Try comparing them to a non-dowsing water company technician instead, because that's the actual meaningful alternative. Nobody is suggesting we can do their job better than them - just that the dowsing is bullshit. I'll bet you'll see that there is no meaningful difference between the dowsers and non-dowsers. Because the dowsing is bullshit. Skilled and experienced technicians are good at what they do because of skills and experience, not some magic show with a couple of sticks.
posted by Dysk at 6:28 AM on November 23, 2017


Try comparing them to a non-dowsing water company technician instead

That's testing the relative performance of technicians, not the utility of dowsing.

Because the dowsing is bullshit.

Proposition 1: Any explanation of dowsing that rests on some direct effect of the objects being dowsed for on the dowsing tools, independent of conscious or subconscious influence by the dowser, is bullshit.

I am aware of plenty of test results that clearly confirm proposition 1. I believe proposition 1 to be correct. Vehemently arguing with me that proposition 1 is indeed correct is a waste of your time and mine.

Proposition 2: For search tasks encountered by an experienced dowser in their usual course of business, the use of dowsing yields better search results than tool-free guesswork performed by the same person.

I have never seen one documented instance of a trial designed to test proposition 2 with any degree of rigour. Have you? If so, I'd be interested in reading the results. Until then, I'd rather keep considering it an open question than throw my support behind a literal witch-hunt.
posted by flabdablet at 7:15 AM on November 23, 2017


I WANT TO BELIEVE

I'll give you my dowsing wages
When you pry the rods from my cold dead hands
posted by Nelson at 7:57 AM on November 23, 2017


I think it's quite telling that a self-styled skeptic would resort to ridicule rather than pointing to, you know, evidence.

We know that the placebo effect works better than no treatment at all, even when the user knows that the placebo is merely a placebo. It was not at all obvious that this would be the case; I'm quite sure that before the idea was properly tested, any number of Respectable Internet Skeptics would have dismissed it as obviously false.

It is not at all obvious to me that ideomotor-driven dowsing tools could not possibly yield similarly surprising results. Why is it so obvious to you? You say you're a skeptic. What is it about the idea of actually collecting some data that you find so hilariously objectionable?
posted by flabdablet at 8:09 AM on November 23, 2017


Because lots of people have collected lots of evidence over many years and have continuously demonstrated dowsing does not work. To the point where no one serious is going to bother again. I'm sure not going to. You've moved the goalposts a few times and dismiss all those studies. OK. Because you want to believe. Enjoy your belief!
posted by Nelson at 8:14 AM on November 23, 2017 [3 favorites]


That's testing the relative performance of technicians, not the utility of dowsing.

Yes it's a treat of relative performance of technicians - which is a test of the efficacy of dowsing. If the dowsing affords any meaningful advantage compared to just making do without, that'd be apparent in the test of the relative performance of dowsing and non-dowsing technicians.

We don't have access to the data, but given that the water companies discourage the use of dowsing, their internal performance measures aren't likely to indicate any performance advantage of dowsing.

Because it's bullshit.
posted by Dysk at 8:38 AM on November 23, 2017


Because lots of people have collected lots of evidence over many years and have continuously demonstrated dowsing does not work.

No, lots of people have collected lots of evidence over many years that demonstrates that dowsing performs no better than guesswork for finding (a) graves (b) objects concealed by the experimenter.

Point me to one study that demonstrates that it works worse than considered guesswork for finding artesian water, concealed pipework or other stuff that water company employees have been observed using it to search for. Because that is the only study result that could justify making a hue and cry about water company employees using it in circumstances where they can't use something more reliable.

Alternatively, point me to one instance where a UK water company employee has used dowsing when they could have used some more reliable method instead and this has resulted in unnecessary expense. Because that is the only argument for water companies specifically prohibiting the use of dowsing as a matter of policy.

Because you want to believe.

No, because I prefer not to join in on a literal witch-hunt unless presented with evidence that doing so would cause more good than harm.

given that the water companies discourage the use of dowsing

Oh, they do? None of them are reported as saying that in any of the articles linked from this thread. Strongest I saw them in that direction is saying that the use of dowsing is not officially sanctioned.

The entire point of the linked articles is to deplore this attitude as insufficiently anti-witchcraft.
posted by flabdablet at 8:50 AM on November 23, 2017


You've moved the goalposts a few times and dismiss all those studies.

If you want to believe that kicking goals is impossible on the basis of hundreds of trials conducted on tennis courts, that's fine - you do you. But I'm not going to support calls to prohibit the wearing of football boots in the workplace.
posted by flabdablet at 9:04 AM on November 23, 2017


Apparently the city of Ottawa Still uses water divining as well.
posted by fimbulvetr at 9:42 AM on December 2, 2017


Explorers find massive ice-age cavern beneath Montreal

Le Blanc and Caron said they were able to pinpoint the location of the passageway using a dowsing rod, similar to the wooden divination tools sometimes used to find groundwater.

posted by figurant at 10:24 AM on December 2, 2017 [2 favorites]


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