Mike, your posts in this thread have revealed a lot more than your Revelation Rod ever did. A great "read the advertisement" opportunity. It's "skeptics don't have to make this stuff up" material.
There's a real good reason why your opinion of what works in dowsing (in this case which you seem to be equating with LRL's?) is directly opposed to what some other people in the dowsing forum think. And, it's also connected to the reason why you got so parsed arf about it that you came here and attacked Art who was just trying to figure out what your post had to do with LRL's! It's also connected with the (apparent) fact that you've been screwing around with so-called "MFD's". It's all connected.
When a person goes doodlebugging, they'll probably be getting apparent "hits", or dowsing responses. (If they don't, they give up, end of story.) They probably won't know why they got those responses, so they'll look for explanations. If you go messing around with bogus electronic stuff that's supposed to be enhanced doodlebugging, your ability to reason through it will be made worse by the fact that you have even more explanations available to you, explanations which unfortunately are just as bogus as the electronic stuff itself.
Some guys got dowsing responses at certain times and not at others, and for some reason got the idea to check solar storm related stuff to see if it correlated. In some cases there seemed to be a positive correlation, and from then on out as long as the person kept track of solar storms, the ideomotor responses reflected that, reinforcing the belief system which in fact had no cause and effect basis. Then you've got some other guys who got a negative correlation, decided to keep track of solar storms, and their belief also became a self-fulling prophecy which seemed to validate something which in fact was false. I've even seen instances where LRL'ers simply made up a fantasy over what the sun was doing, eliminating the inconvenience of having to rely on scientific data. The resulting "validation" which results from failure to understand what's going on, produces certainty about things which are false, and that certainty leads to disputes over things which have no factual basis.
And it's not just solar storms. We've got the time-of-day and phase-of-the-moon fans, and probably planet alignment fans as well. Glue a calculator to a swivel rod, and you've got a peculiar sort of lottery where you get to say what the winning number is right there in your hand. Got a 555 timer circuit to produce signals you haven't even 'scoped to know what they are? Well, whatever you believe they are, that belief will decide what kind of dowsing responses you get. If one LRL guru says gold is 300 Hz and another one says 50 kHz, the gold itself has no idea what these folks are saying, but LRL gullibillies know what they're saying. It's all about belief.
When you got something happening that you don't understand, and you're reaching for an explanation, of course you look for other events with which it seems to be correlated. It is then easy to presume that there's a cause-and-effect mechanism connecting the two things. The more kinds of "other events" you look at hoping to find a correlation, the greater the likelihood that you'll find a correlation, even though there's no cause and effect relationship. The quest for correlation to be interpreted (at your own risk) as cause-and-effect, has a name-- "correlation shopping".
Correlation shopping is the dynamite that blows to smithereens most medical research, since that's a field driven by people who are desperate to "prove stuff" so they can get more money. (Sound familiar?) The way reality torpedoes medical researchers who don't understand the difference between correlation and cause-and-effect, is when some competing laboratory tries to replicate the results and comes up empty-handed. And either publishes, or dials the original researchers for hush money.
Unfortunately, the field of dowsing/LRLing is a lot worse than that, and the reason is ideomotor effect. The rods don't move by themselves, they move because the user tilted them-- in other words, they're "gravitators" just like Thomas says they are. The overwhelming majority of dowsers/LRLers deny ideomotor effect, and thus cut themselves out of any chance to reason about cause and effect. If you think you've got a correlation, from then out you watch the supposed "cause" and because of what you believe about that cause (and not because of the cause itself) you either do or don't get a dowsing response.
One might do as well trying to correlate dowsing response with the stock market, the price of gold, or even the number of flat toads lying beside the roadway. In another thread, Mike insisted on correlating it with the theological opinions of the doodlebugger, although since I pointed out how ludicrous it was to mistake treasure hunting apparatus for religious opinion detection apparatus, he seems to have backed off.
And therein lies the problem with (for example) the solar storm dependent indices: without evidence of cause and effect, it's up against an unlimited number of other theories with zero evidence. The battle between the unlimited potential number of zero-evidence theories has even gone so far as to produce the so-called "ion guns" (Mineoro-style) which eliminate the swivel that makes ideomotor response so easy! The result is the worst complaint record on the part of users in all of LRL history. Without ideomotor response to falsely "validate" the theory, the user is stuck having to admit that the thing does not work, and it's not the user's fault, it's the factory's fault.
* * * * * * * * * * *
And that's why understanding how LRL's "work" isn't about electronics or magnetic forces or solar storms, it's about understanding what goes on between the ears of people who get sucked into it and why they persist even though their explanations of what they're doing are completely baseless.
It's also why I say that if you go messing with LRL's, you can expect results worse than from plain vanilla dowsing. Not only does that assertion have some good logic behind it, you can find it corroborated by LRL fans whose stories are mostly so laughable that they'd be dissed in a dowsing forum nearly as bad as they get dissed here by the dreaded "skeptics". (You already heard Mike's complaints about both forums, I don't have to make this up!)
--Toto
