This a great forum for researching human nature.

[Mike(Mont)]

I am fairly confident at this point that skeptics could benefit from the clearing. What seems evident to me is they have no desire to learn to use a locator.

Dave, you have a long way to go if you want to learn how LRL users function. First thing is to pull your head out of your rear. We all know that is not going to happen in this lifetime.

 

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[Rudy(CA)]

You are 100% correct Mike…It is a good way of fooling people into making a donation to his life style. It is clear to see just how people he has fooled..Just count the ones here..Art

Here you go Art. Make a donation for one of these http://detectors.gr/detectors/ No, I'm afraid it's not tax deductible
but you get a new box to play with.

 

[Mike(Mont)]

Art, remember these skeptics are energy vampires. I know SOMETIMES it is difficult to resist the temptation to argue with them, but whenever that happens, you give away your personal power. Yes, I am guilty of this, too. Said another way SKEPTICS SUCK!!!

 

[Mike(Mont)]

Art, here is one I am guilty of: Avoid playing savior. It is an ego trip to try and help others to make oneself feel better.

 

[Carl-NC]

There is a catch-all clause there saying it is up to their panel of "experts" to decide if the prize is to be awarded.

Mike, someone is feeding you a load of it. There is no such clause. But, yeah, somehow it's all Randi's fault.

 

[Real de Tayopa Tropical Tramp]

HI it was posted -->LRL proponents aren't within a billion light years of employing these processes- the same processes that have created everything from nuclear fission, down to the first use of the wheel.

*******************
May I point out that these processes themelves were all once subject to negation themselves.

Don Jose de La Mancha.

 

[Saturna]

In keeping with the 'human nature' topic, Art & Mike have certainly demonstrated what kind of response to expect when you question someone's religion.
*Massive defensiveness and mantras.*

And this stuff IS a religion to some.

It wouldn't be difficult to find folks who will verify that they SAW a faith healer cure a cripple, or make a blind man see. They SAW it done, right ? Why won't YOU believe ?


Some simply want to believe, others require a bit more evidence.

 

[EE THr]

EddieR---

For me, personally, I don't have any need for you to be humble about anything, although I do acknowledge and appreciate your gesture. And I fully accept your apology, without prejudice or fanfare.

And I understand what you are saying about some posts, and how you feel about the people who wrote them.


My thoughts, in general, and not pertaining to anyone specifically---

Myself, I wouldn't be opposed to anyone's participation, it's just that there are some things that I don't consider to be "discussing" a topic. Like insults, non-answer babble, and refusals to answer requests for explanations. Then there are the problems of someone stating theories, and claiming them to be facts, which only leads to confusions.

Or, sometimes less obvious, the error of basing a theory on another theory, which itself is sometimes based on even another theory. That can get so far off of any understandable path that there is essentially no hope for return! And to argue and insult, at that point, is absolutely fruitless, and usually laughable to everyone but the participants in the argument.

I think if people want to try and figure out what is going on with LRLs, and also dowsing, they need to differentiate between known facts and unknown possibilities, and be careful to not mix the two together, because they are like oil and water, when it comes to understanding and agreement.

In other words, if someone says, "Maybe this happens this way, based the theory of such and such," I don't think that's problem for most people. But if a person insists that his idea, which is actually based on only a certain theory, is absolutely true; and furthermore says that anyone who doesn't believe it is nuts, then that obviously becomes a problem which disrupts any coherent conversation.

 

[aarthrj3811]

Thank You EE THr for your apology..We gladly except it..We know that it is very hard for people to realize that they have been scammed by a magician..I have a pretty good handle of the facts of LRL usage by real experience in the hobby of Treasure Hunting..Art

 

[EE THr]

Thank You EE THr for your apology..We gladly except it..We know that it is very hard for people to realize that they have been scammed by a magician..I have a pretty good handle of the facts of LRL usage by real experience in the hobby of Treasure Hunting..Art

Huh?

 

[woof!]

Saturna, for most people "faith healing" is all about religion, and few people understand religion well enough to carry on a two way conversation about it. That makes it almost impossible to have a two way conversation about "faith healing". Perhaps if you changed the phrase to "ritual healing" then rational discourse on the subject could be entertained, although most would regard this as the wrong forum for such a discourse. However, the scientific principles of ritual healing are pretty much the same as those of selling LRL's, the big difference being the ethics. The purpose of scientifically based ritual healing is to heal someone, whereas the purpose of scientifically based LRL marketing is to clean out someone's wallet (and usually to have a good laugh meanwhile).

Both things are connected to the question of why people who use LRL's and dowsing rods and other esoteric apparatus think they're getting good results and/or that the apparatus is "working", even when the bottom line is they aren't getting good results and the apparatus is not "working".

* * * * *

However there's this other issue, and that's the matter of people locating stuff successfully through esoteric means inclusive of LRL's. If of course you believe that such a thing is possible. I know through personal experience it's possible, but don't have any way to "prove it" to someone else who suspects it's bogus and wants proof.

One of the big challenges on an LRL or dowsing forum is trying to figure out who actually locates stuff successfully, who believes they do but they're mistaken, and who's just making stuff up. There is such an overwhelming abundance of stuff that's obviously in categories 2 and 3, it's pretty hard to identify stuff that may be in category 1. Even someone who's a compulsive BS'er might have a successful locate (by this I mean a ground truthed locate of a nature which is statistically improbable). But to someone listening to the story it's indistinguishable from the same old BS.

So-- if you don't know from personal experience that "successful locates" of that sort do happen, it would be hard to come to the conclusion that they actually do happen just by listening to people's stories. One might get halfway there by admitting that there's stuff that happens in the world that we don't yet have good explanations for, and that such stuff could theoretically include "successful locates" of the sort I'm talking about.

--Toto

 

[woof!]

Thank You EE THr for your apology..We gladly except it..We know that it is very hard for people to realize that they have been scammed by a magician..I have a pretty good handle of the facts of LRL usage by real experience in the hobby of Treasure Hunting..Art

Huh?

**********************

There are some obstacles to that discussion

1. The people on both sides of the aisle with the most strongest and most polarized opinions are the ones who have nothing to contribute to the discussion.

4. It involves subject matter which if explored by people who are competent to explore it and want to understand it better, leads away from commercial LRL's as we presently know them. So those here with commercial interests in LRL's will do their best to disrupt the discussion.

--Toto

 

[EE THr]

woof!---

BINGO!

 

[Saturna]

One of the big challenges on an LRL or dowsing forum is trying to figure out who actually locates stuff successfully, who believes they do but they're mistaken, and who's just making stuff up.

There is such an overwhelming abundance of stuff that's obviously in categories 2 and 3, it's pretty hard to identify stuff that may be in category 1.

Well said.

 

[EE THr]

Art, here is one I am guilty of: Avoid playing savior. It is an ego trip to try and help others to make oneself feel better.

But if a person already feels OK, and helps others just because he chooses to do so, then it doesn't necessarily mean that he is on an ego trip.

I don't think considering everyone to be couch material, is a necessity of good mental health.

...Just sayin'....

 

[LM]

The problem here is the wildest things happen at the most unexpected times. No camera, no witnesses, no one around. Come here and tell what happened and the flies descend.

The gold standard of science is repeatability. While erratic or intermittent data can be a cue that something is worth investigating further, you first must have credible data to examine in the first place, which LRL does not. Anecdote is not data. Theory is not data.

One can safely assume that when someone suggests an unproven article of faith can perform very specific scientific functions yet coincidentally, said article only seems to perform those functions when no one else is present and they're the only soul there to experience it, indeed, we can assume that 'human nature' is in play and a particularly unfortunate aspect of it. It takes the same shape, almost always- huge claims that fall just short of being able to prove themselves.

It all boils down to probability, based on evidence.

You're sitting at home late one night when you hear tires screech and a crash. You look out the window to see a pink Cadillac crashed into a light pole. A giant, 7' tall man wearing a purple, polka-dotted tutu gets out, examines the damage, then backs up and hurriedly drives away. You phone the police and tell them what you saw. Minutes later and not 4 blocks away, the police pull over a pink Cadillac with significant front end damage, being driven by a 7' tall man wearing a purple polka dotted tutu. The police ask the man why he drove away from the accident scene. He insists that he was never there, they must have him mistake for someone else... The front end damage to his pink Cadillac? Happened sometime last week. And the eye witness who reported it was driven by a 7' tall man wearing a purple polka dotted tutu? Must've been some other 7' tall man with a purple-polka dotted tutu in a pink Cadillac, because THIS one claims he was no where near the scene...

Do you believe him? How much latitude do you allow for the *possibility* that indeed, there were two 7' tall men wearing purple polka-dotted tutus driving Pink Cadillacs with front end damage within 4 blocks of each other on the same night of that accident? The answer, of course, is virtually zero, yet to LRL people, this would be a 50/50 coinflip as to whether or not he's telling the truth, or, a 100% certainty that this man was just the victim of a 1,000,000,000/1 coincidence and they believe him.

 

[EE THr]

LSM---

The "Tutu Man Syndrome"! I like it!

 

[woof!]

Morgan, I would agree that the golden standard for science is repeatability, although some would prefer the word "predictability". However everyday life is lived mostly according to opinion based on anecdotal evidence, and somehow we've survived it so far. There's a science to that, too, even though it falls short of the "golden standard".

A surprising number of we forum denizens are engineers. In order to be successful at engineering, you have to think scientifically. Civil engineering places a high premium on the "golden standard", so most such engineering is done by the cookbook. The thing being engineered probably won't fall down, that's the important part. Whether or not it serves a useful purpose or even should have been built in the first place is a judgment call that's mostly political. That, too, could be reasoned about scientifically, but politicians don't usually regard that as important. .....On the other end of the engineering spectrum, you have engineers designing things that nobody's seen before and for which there is no cookbook. To remain employed doing this, things that don't exist have to be brought into existence and they have to meet a sufficient standard of overall predictability to warrant continuing investment in that engineer. This requires scientific thinking applied to insight rather than to just hindsight. It is scientific thinking: the proof of that, is that engineers who don't what to do with insight don't deliver profitable leading-edge products.

Beyond even that, there is scientific thinking applied to problems which do not yet admit of testability. The aim of such thinking is to achieve a clearer understanding of confusing evidence. It may eventually lead to a testable hypothesis or it may not. Scientific reasoning applied to ancient history, for instance, does not usually lead to "proof" of anything inasmuch as the past cannot be replicated. The test of a hypothesis regarding ancient history is whether or not it makes more sense out of otherwise confusing evidence, than other hypotheses, and even that's a judgment call because no two historians are reasoning about the same data set and they bring with them their own individual interpretive contexts. But even in dealing with ancient history, scientific thinking and BS thinking are not on equal footing. BS thinking gives individuals "what they want" but it fails the broader enterprise of engaging in the messy process of increasing our collective understanding of ancient history-- because that, after all, is not the purpose of BS thinking.

* * * * * *

So-- science is a whole lot more than agreeing with Newton's Laws. It is a mental discipline of dealing with the unknown, just as it was for Mr. Newton himself before he formulated the Laws of Motion.

Addressing the issue of "paranormal phenomena" (inclusive of the possibility that some LRL locates are the real deal and not just dumb luck or misinterpretation of data or worse) is an enterprise entirely worthy of the application of scientific reasoning, even though at this stage of knowledge it's in the realm of things that aren't reproducible under controlled conditions.

--Toto

 

[aarthrj3811]

~Woof~

Addressing the issue of "paranormal phenomena" (inclusive of the possibility that some LRL locates are the real deal and not just dumb luck or misinterpretation of data or worse) is an enterprise entirely worthy of the application of scientific reasoning, even though at this stage of knowledge it's in the realm of things that aren't reproducible under controlled conditions.

Thank You woof…we are treasure hunters..the conditions we work under are not controlled..Knowledge of our equipment, Knowledge of the area, research knowledge and where the type of objects is most likely to be hidden is a big part of being sucessful..Art

 

[LM]

Addressing the issue of "paranormal phenomena" (inclusive of the possibility that some LRL locates are the real deal and not just dumb luck or misinterpretation of data or worse) is an enterprise entirely worthy of the application of scientific reasoning, even though at this stage of knowledge it's in the realm of things that aren't reproducible under controlled conditions.

LRL absolutely is worth looking at scientifically, but to requote Chesterton once ... "The object of an open mind- as with an open mouth- is to close it again on something solid."

Thus far, LRL has no basis in fact and only the most tenuous basis in theory. Everything we've seen so far, in terms of practical manifestation of working LRL units, has been in the form of quack devices that achieve nothing beyond creating an imaginary nexus between the 'hopes' of certain people who sincerely want to believe its true and the credible appearance of a manufactured product.