Real de Tayopa said:
You have many valid points Carl. However no-one successfully dowses consistently or even most of the time, on the contrary.
Oddly, many dowsers (esp water dowsers) claim they are successful 100% of the time.
p.s. ¿ I wonder how many try out for positions in the baseball, leagues, for those few that are selected for further intensive training? In my USAF Aviation Cadet class in the 50's, there were approximately 2500 applicants, yet only 25 of us were chosen. Does that mean that the others were without equal Pilot / Officer Qualities, or was a bit of luck involved and gradually decreasing qualifications? So it goes with dowsers. Very few have fairly consistent abilities, none 100% of the time.
Although skill plays the biggest role in these cases, I'm sure a few "luck" out.
An interesting dowsing experiment was Betz's "Sheunen" tests. He started with ~500 experienced dowsers and ran them through a pretty good double-blind test. 43 did better than chance, so he re-tested those. In round 2, a very few did better than chance, so he re-tested those. And they failed to exceed chance. Did these dowsers proceed through the tests due to skill or chance? If you look at the design of the test, statistics predicts a Gaussian distribution that results in a percentage that perform better than some threshold, if chance is at work. And that was exactly the outcome. This is why we do repeated tests, to separate skill from luck.
Self-testing is notoriously difficult to do and fraught with unintentional pitfalls. However, I'm working on an MFD design that may change the mind of even the most staunch LRL proponent. Actually, I doubt it, but it is a good way to do self-tests.
