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I recommend the book Paranormality from Richard Wiseman: https://www.amazon.com/Paranormality-Why-what-isnt-there/dp/...

Essentially if any of these powers were true, they could be reproduced in a scientific experiment and then reversed engineer on why they actually work. There is even a foundation with 1 million dollar price for whoever proves to have paranormal abilities. No-one has ever been able to prove scientifically to have paranormal power and won the prize for decades.

⬐ hajile

I've seen conjecture that there is a real science behind this, but it doesn't involve the sticks per-se. In order to use them, there must be a focus on the thing you desire to find. This creates a sort of meditative trance with the sticks as the "focus" when in reality, the meditation is freeing up the conscious mind to not ignore the very subtle signs of an area being disturbed.

The fact is that they do indeed find bodies this way. The chances of randomly digging up a body by pure guess are vanishingly rare. We're talking at most around 10 square feet (often just 4-5 square feet) while there are 43,560 per acre or 27,878,400 per square mile. Even if you buried 1000 bodies in that square mile, your chances of finding one would still be a fraction of a percent.

⬐ ceejayoz

> Even if you buried 1000 bodies in that square mile, your chances of finding one would still be a fraction of a percent.

Only if burying a body left no trace.

I can spot where deer have pooped in my lawn because there's a tuft of greener grass. Digging a big hole and putting 150 pounds of flesh into it is going to change stuff that's likely visible to an experienced tracker.

⬐ musingsole

> that's likely visible to an experienced tracker

And the GP's point is that this technique is little more than a focusing meditation for an experienced tracker.

⬐ ceejayoz

If that's the mechanism, we should figure out ways of meditating that don't involve charlatans or $60k fake devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651).

⬐ musingsole

I'm not so sure.

Athletes in particular spend ungodly sums on performance aids, many of which have no scientific basis -- but, if it helps the athlete get into a winning mindset, what grounds do you really have to tell them to stop?

⬐ josefx

Athletes that win spend ungodly sums on performance aids which have scientific basis, however getting caught would get them disqualified so they will pretend to have other tricks up their sleeves. For the police this is called parallel construction where they use some highly illegal means to get information and then hire a guy with a stick to "find" the corpse officially.

⬐ bqmjjx0kac

Neat, I didn't know that was called parallel construction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

⬐ ceejayoz

Athletes don't have the power to detain, arrest, or shoot me.

If the local football player wants to use a dowsing rod in search of treasure, go for it. If the local cops want to dig up my backyard because they got a hit off one, they can fuck off.

⬐ staticassertion

> The chances of randomly digging up a body by pure guess are vanishingly rare.

If your "guess" is a random walk, sure. But it isn't. You're going to walk around, see disturbed dirt, bias towards a trail, or where it makes sense, etc. I don't really but the trance thing.

⬐ pmarreck

This is what I was going to suggest. The rods are merely a catalyst to free your "intuitive senses" or whatever; noticing subtle depressions in the dirt, the arrangement of foliage being "off", etc. might be more apparent if you weren't looking directly at them (as counter-intuitive as that sounds, no pun intended... But tell me this- How many times have you come up with a solution to a problem long after you were directly thinking about it and while doing something entirely different? Because that has happened to me MANY times, I'm sure it's happened to many people who will read this, and is JUST as difficult to "prove scientifically")

⬐ whodunnit

It’s probably just a way to access subconscious pattern matching in a way that bypasses the neocortex for output. An intuition magnifier.

⬐ bqmjjx0kac

A horrifying alternative explanation is that some killers masquerade as magical corpse finders, contributing to that effectiveness statistic.

⬐ nradov

Trained dogs are pretty good at locating buried corpses by smell. We know scientifically how it works, but no one has been able to build an artificial equivalent.

⬐ doodlebugging

We have dogs, why do we need an artificial equivalent? Are we trying to avoid paying for all that dog food and all those treats by designing and building some potentially expensive gizmo that doesn't need regular feedings, treats, or attention?

⬐ carapace

The loophole in this logic is the assumption of non-entity of the principle (or rather principal) behind these "powers". The agency of the paranormal is not physical (in the sense of being inanimate) but psychological (in the sense that there is "mind" or "being" behind it.) The agency of the paranormal has respect for one's beliefs and will not force itself on skeptics. Obviously, this precludes it participating in any scientific study or experiment that had the potential to cause internal mental confrontations in mass society. To the agency that engenders what we call the paranormal a million dollars is no more important, interesting, or useful than a rock or a pile of sand.

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edit to add: In case it's not clear, this also means that "psychic powers" and dowsing are NOT compatible with a fair trial, etc. I agree that what they're doing here is messed up.

⬐ Flozzin

I'm going to play devils advocate here. We already know that the observer effect is real. We have no idea on what level the spiritual world is in. I would find it logical, that if we ever do discover that this paranormal realm we can tap into is real, that one of the reasons we ignored it so long is that, our intentions have much to do with it. So participating in studies to prove its real would effect how it behaves.

Personally.. I highly doubt its real, else we would have more people doing this full time. There were also the divining rods that were bomb detectors(https://slate.com/technology/2013/04/dowsing-for-bombs-maker...).

People are crazy with what we will and won't believe. With varying levels of proof on each side...

⬐ IanCal

We could eliminate that though. Even if there were an effect that was impacted by our intentions we could design experiments that were measuring the effect of earnestly carried out actions.

If the effect is broken as long as someone is able to, after the fact, discern if there's any benefit vs chance - there is no possible effect.

⬐ noasaservice

That's what Aleister Crowley was trying to do. His initial goal was to connect science and magick into a complete system. (He kinda devolved into crazy)

Why do some people feel it? Why do some dont? What is the nature of this "energy"? Can devices do magick instead of humans?

There's enough coincidences that should make most at least curious what's going on. It may be nothing... but probably isn't.

⬐ voakbasda

If you learn about biology and physiology of the human body and mind, you will realize that our senses are easily fooled by both external and internal forces. All of the so-called mystical forces are more easily explained by such factors.

Occam’s razor applies here. Human perception is incredible fallible and highly susceptible to self-subversion, and that is the simplest and most likely explanation of any magical or mystical phenomena.

⬐ noasaservice

If you think I was wanting a comment, you'd be sorely mistaken.

⬐ kaibee

> We already know that the observer effect is real.

If you're talking about the quantum mechanics effect, then you're misunderstanding it. In QM 'observing' just means measuring something about a system. The only way we know of measuring stuff on a quantum level is by poking it with light or other particles. On the scale of quantum interactions, poking something with light affects the thing you're trying to measure. The 'observer effect' has nothing to do with there being any sort of conscious or intelligent observer.

⬐ musingsole

> The 'observer effect' has nothing to do with there being any sort of conscious or intelligent observer.

If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?

Science can't meaningfully separate any of its observations from a conscious observer. At present, that's the realm of philosophy.

⬐ mypalmike

If you rigorously define the term "make a sound", the tree in a forest question loses its apparent profundity.

⬐ musingsole

Then please do so.

Until you have conscious observer, you have no evidence that anything at all has happened and you might as well discuss angels on a pinhead.

⬐ mypalmike

Better than me defining it, you should choose a definition. Make it rigorous and unambiguously testable and your conundrum goes away.

Furthermore, plenty of phenomena are detectable without a present conscious observer. If I accidentally drop a bread crumb as I bite into a crusty sandwich while walking in the forest and nobody notices, does it ever land on the ground? (Note that in this case, there's no linguistic ambiguity to insert a false profundity to the question. "Land on the ground" is pretty clearly defined.)

We know the answer is yes because we understand gravity. And as evidence (rather than first principles), we might also find ants later in the spot where the breadcrumb landed.

⬐ musingsole

Schroedinger's breadcrumb.

⬐ brimble

Note for the confused: the "observer effect", as in modifying a system by poking it in order to measure it, is not the same thing as the uncertainty principal. Evidently, somehow, Heisenberg himself got the two confused (?!) which is why when I learned about it by fucking reading Heisenberg ("surely this will be accurate") I ended up thinking the two were basically the same thing.

⬐ ComradePhil

> There is even a foundation with 1 million dollar price for whoever proves to have paranormal abilities

You probably mean the James Randi foundation prize. That was terminated in 2015.

Also, anything not understood scientifically as of now is "paranormal"... and these people claiming to give these prizes are not truly curious and have these to prove a point, the point being "we already know what is there to be known". They always have gotchas and are not worth the trouble. If you discover things like that, you are better off looking somewhere else.

⬐ AlexandrB

Dark matter/energy is not fully understood scientifically, but is not "paranormal".

"Paranormal" are generally things that defy already-understood scientific laws. E.g. mind reading, telepathy, or "breatharianism". Often these phenomena fall apart completely once closely examined. A more edge case is/was the "Em Drive" thruster[1]. This seemed to hold up to scrutiny in a few tests, but further investigation showed the results may have been caused by subtle measurement error.

I think it's really uncharitable to claim that James Randi is "not truly curious". Indeed, I find proponents of the paranormal to be the incurious ones as they tend to stick to their beliefs even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That's not curiosity, it's stubbornness.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive

⬐ WinterMount223

Not everything is able to be reproduced scientifically and reversed engineered. It’s not less real because of that.

You may know how to ride a bike. Can you reverse engineer and explain in an algorithmic way how to ride a bike? No. Does that invalidate the fact that you can indeed ride a bike? Of course not.

Edit: do not fixate on the bike. It was just an example. Write a symphony, create a joke, understand irony.

⬐ amerkhalid

I agree that there are things that are true but not explainable like at the edge of our knowledge, black holes, quantum physics etc.

But riding a bike seems very easy algorithm. All these self balancing scooters, remote controlled toys, seems like perfect examples of what you get when you reverse engineer bikes.

⬐ staticassertion

Of course we can reverse engineer and describe how bikes work...

Anyway, the fact that we can not formally prove all true things doesn't really matter. That doesn't make all things equally valid. We find supporting evidence, we build conceptual models, we test the periphery of systems.

⬐ croon

Even if you could not explain how you ride a bike, you could still reproduce it scientifically. You don't have to understand something to reproduce it, only what parameters are needed for reproducing it.

You could observe the sun rising and setting long before understanding the revolutions of our planet.

If someone can do something, you can reproduce it. That's true for bike-riding, but apparently not true for dowsing.

⬐ moconnor

Of course you can do that. You can even measure the angles and forces involved. There is no “unexplained physics” in bicycle riding.

Dowsing for corpses, on the other hand, absolutely requires new physics, because the pseudo-physical explanations offered around piezoelectricity and people having different voltages are deeply inconsistent with our understanding of physics.

⬐ newacc9

if the source of paranormal activity is demons, which is the catholic position, then the abilities will only work when the demon allows.

⬐ Cthulhu_

I mean the one with the sticks should be really easy to study scientifically, just have a group of diviners with no prior knowledge of an area find the corpses or water or whichever. Simple to do, statistically sound, etc.

That said, I wouldn't use water as an example; I'm no geologist but I'm fairly sure you'll find water in most places if you dig deep enough, there's not going to be underground rivers that are very location specific for which you need divining so much.

⬐ Geezus-42

They have done statistical analysis on diving for water and it didn't go well for the diviners, so of course they made up a bunch of excuses.

⬐ BrandoElFollito

The tests that were done were with pipes buried in an area. The 'divinators' (I do not know how they are called in English, the ones that find water with a stick) agreed that the test is fair.

They did not find anything that wild be above statistically expected results.

I will add a source if I find it, but it is at least 20 years old

⬐ hef19898

There is some selection bias in there so. Not everyone of those water-finders might actually be one, they could just think they are.

Point in case, back the day when well digging was still an expensive, and important thing people actually paid people able to find water. Obviously not everyone did, I know of one who was paid based on success so. And that was part of of his overall income (rural Bavaria before WW2).

So for water, yeah, I guess there are people that actually can do it. For everything else we don't have historic precedence, so I'm doubtful.

⬐ matthewdgreen

A theory I’ve heard is the value of dowsing might be that it is essentially random. If you ask a group of people to find something using their rational faculties, they’ll tend to restrict their search to certain areas... all of which other people will have already examined for similar reasons. Whereas the random nature of dowsing encourages people to search more broadly. Sometimes a random approach actually produces better results.

⬐ marcodiego

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing#Studies

⬐ tokai

There's has been a lot of research done on dowsing, over a period of hundred years. You will find studies pointing one way or another. But no smoking gun either way. Its has tapered off since the 80s, cause there's not much reason going on with a field of study that cant get anywhere in a hundred years of work. Scientificality it is pretty clear that divining is useless.

http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/Dowsing.htm