[zigzaggy]

My grandfather was a "well witcher" (Appalachian roots here). Many believe that's woo woo or some kind of super power. The man was incredibly intelligent and resourceful and he had a reputation for finding water every single time he dropped the drill into the ground.

When I was a kid I used to go to sleep listening to stories of my dad and his dad driving around on a 2 ton truck with a 3 ton drill and how the brakes always went out. Somehow they always lived to tell the tale.

Haven't thought about this in a long time. Good memories.

[presidentender]

My dad drilled water wells in the US after spending many years working on oil wells overseas. His clients would often hire witchers (water witches, water witchers, well witches - I think the distance from Appalachia to Montana clouded the specific vocabulary). You'd have this very old man dodder around the property with a pair of sticks, and when the sticks magically chose to pull together and cross, that's where you'd dig the well.

I do not recall whether the magical approach was any more successful than the traditional approach.

[bluGill]

In most cases you can drill just about anywhere and find water. So any approach from random to looking at geological features (which you can gather from seismograph data, if needed set off an explosion in controlled locations...) will find water. The latter approach may find a specific place where a less deep well can work, but in most locations there isn't that much a difference (at least not among the reasonable places to drill your well - if you are willing to pay for miles of pipe you can maybe have a useful choice of location).

[dreamcompiler]

When I built my house in the country, the well driller insisted on witching. He said "we should drill right here." I said "No, move it 100 feet that way. Your spot is right in the middle of my future driveway."

"I can't guarantee we'll hit water there" he said.

"I paying you. Just drill where I said" I said.

And of course we hit water.

[bombcar]

Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country has a whole section on wells. The main key seems to be onsite when it is drilled, because otherwise they'll just leave after drilling one, even if it is dry.

[johnloeber]

It's called Dowsing and there's no evidence that it works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing

[laurencerowe]

When I was about 12 my dad wanted to do some work plumbing in the house but couldn’t find the stopcock to turn off the water. Figuring it was buried somewhere in the hedge he got me to dowse for the water line with a couple of bent coat hangers.

Waking back and forth across the front lawn the bent coat hangers crossed consistently along a line so he started digging. Unfortunately the pipe he holed with the garden fork was the gas supply and the day ended with the gas company coming around to patch the line. I don’t think we ever found the water stopcock.

Though we can’t explain it dowsing does seem to work. There is however no guarantee that what you find is what you were looking for…

[hypercube33]

I mean statistics may, if someone spent enough time, show that things are generally where they feel best being because a human like you put it there. also you have about a 50% give or take winning anything so leaving it to odds feels better than trying to push one way or another.

[stickfigure]

It's shocking how many people still give weight to astrology.

[cman1444]

I consider myself a pretty cynical person, but I tried it myself to prove someone else wrong and I couldn't help but feel like it actually worked.

We were looking for a water pipe, not just sitting groundwater. The only explanation I could come up with was that for some reason a magnetic field was being created by the pipe underground. I don't remember if the water was flowing or not when we did it.

I feel silly even commenting this, but we truly did find the pipe exactly where I was standing when the rods pointed together.

Of course it's very possible that I unconsciously tilted my hands in the spot where I suspected the pipe would be. Even though I did make a conscious effort to not do exactly that, I wonder if there is some psychological factor in the phenomenon.

[stickfigure]

It's possible you just got lucky. That's the problem with N=1 experiments, and why you should be skeptical of your limited experience.

Feynman put it this way: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

[mbivert]

Slightly tangential but I've found it insightful: there are studies, e.g. [0], showing correlations between lifespan and date of birth. Causal factors could include for example seasonal viral infections, lesser amount of vitamin D in the winter, etc.

Of course, this tells nothing about well-witching, but illustrates that at least some old beliefs aren't as unreasonable as one might think.

[0]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.041431898

[stickfigure]

Even without evaluating the quality of the study, I don't have a hard time accepting the notion that the season of your birth may affect your average lifespan by a few months. It is a very modest claim.

The claims of astrologers are not at all like this. They are vastly more specific.

[mbivert]

Okay granted; my intent wasn't to justify astrology either, but merely to encourage prudence when dismissing "old ideas." To be clear, I'm not talking about modern astrology, but really about old beliefs that could have been built on repeated observations, but weirdly/poorly phrased.

In The Republic of Plato, there's this idea of rotation between political regimes[0], and it's explained by the way each generation treats the next one. Down to Earth example: think of overprotecting parents making their child unprepared for an ordinary adult life.

Now of course, this is again distant from the discourse of our favorite astrologers, but if you squint a little, there are conceptual similarities.

Thinking about it a little more, and on point to your original remark, I wonder if the fact that a considerable amount of people like to believe in astrology isn't tied to the same instinct that made old people personify everything and anything as Gods: a strong tendency to see order and intelligence in chaos.

After all, science is still about doing just this, minus the anthropomorphism. So, not so shocking: just human nature at works.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)#Book_VIII%E2%...

[stickfigure]

While I don't think this particular wikipedia page is especially concise, I do think it's a great jumping off point for links you will find interesting:

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

I first learned about the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and hyperreligiosity from Robert Sapolsky's Biology and Human Behavior. From your comments I think you'd find it as interesting as I did.

[PebblesRox]

A Facebook friend was talking about how overwhelming and chaotic her life has been feeling lately and people were chiming in to say they were in the same boat and attributing it to the Mercury retro-whatever.

Must just be a coincidence that it's back-to-school season and everyone is transitioning out of their summer routines into school-mode.

[runjake]

I was shocked to randomly drive by a local water utility company and a guy walking in a field holding what looked like dowsing rods in his hands.

I didn't stop to ask, but it wasn't a locate antenna (I am familiar with those, and he didn't have any wires or electronic equipment on him).

I was pretty surprised they were messing around with dowsing, knowing it's scientifically unproven/disproven.

Then again, people still use lie detectors and chiropractics.

[earleybird]

Might not have been dowsing but a geoelectric survey of the inductive/capacitive/resistive variety. The BBC Time Team folks occasionally use these for non invasive surveys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU9aRZK4j84&t=663s

[benoliver999]

In The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a travelogue from the Caribbean, he gives an account of water divination. He initially sees it as some voodoo myth, and is taken aback when they repeatedly find water.

[digitalsushi]

Ok, if I point at a random spot in the ground in an area that generally has water, and I said, "dig here and you will find water", and you put 1/5 a mile of pipe down into the earth and water comes up, am I some type of miracle? Would those people work in the desert? I think it's a lotto ticket that always wins.

[finnh]

I think there is a more functional and charitable read of this: not all of our senses are plumbed all the way through to our conscious mind at all times. small little hints (like minor changes in smell, relative humidity, maybe just pattern-matching on the lay of the land) are down in the noise, and pulling out your trusty sticks gives your subconscious a way to send a signal to your awareness.

Kinda like acupuncture - does my pulse really have seven levels that mean different things? I doubt it.. but a successful acupuncturist might still be able to diagnose "what hurts" using said technique, when really they've already picked up on other clues from your gait, posture, etc.

"subliminal" and "subconscious" are over-used and vague words, but we've all had the experience of wearing a new clothing item and receiving an uncommon number of compliments, including from strangers who wouldn't know it's new. I've always assumed we are unconsciously presenting the new thing with a bit of flair, and that equally-unconsciously draws the eye.

[stickfigure]

This is far too charitable. The first question we should ask is "does it actually work?" and the answer is NO.

The wikipedia page lists quite a few scientific studies that establish this. The net summary is:

The scientific evidence shows that dowsing is no more effective than random chance. It is therefore regarded as a pseudoscience.

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

[the_fury]

You have to be careful of what you mean by "does it actually work".

Does the dowsing find water hidden in a random spot or is the dowser tapping into subconscious knowledge about the land to find it. The parent is talking about the latter.

Look up "Ideomotor phenomenon" in your source. It's right above the pseudoscience bit.

[eesmith]

It's not like subconscious knowledge must be valid subconscious knowledge. The ideomotor phenomenon is an expression of internal belief, which may be little different than a wild-ass guess.

There's no evidence that the dowser is tapping into subconscious knowledge in a way that gives results any better than - or different from - chance.

[darkerside]

Eye tracking probably plays a big role. We are hardwired to notice what other people are looking at.

Also, you bought it because it looked good, didn't you?

[finnh]

The eye tracking explanation is a good one, thanks. I think it supports my hypothesis by providing a possible mechanism of action.

To your second point: yes, of course. But three weeks later it looks (mostly) the same but stops drawing compliments.

[monkmartinez]

These people do work in the desert. I have a buddy that drills wells here in Arizona and he WILL NOT put a drill into the ground without a Witcher. I have a really hard time with "witching" from a logical POV, but my buddy and his $130k truck/equipment swear by it. I call that putting your money where your mouth is.

[gregmac]

The test would be finding a spot where a witcher says there isn't water, and then drilling there.

There's water almost everywhere in the ground -- the questions are is there enough of it to meet the need? is it usable (ie: not contaminated with salt or toxic chemicals)?

[gallamine]

> There's water almost everywhere in the ground

In Arizona?

[kip_]

https://new.azwater.gov/aaws/maps-resources will give you a good idea of how far down wells have to go in various areas of Arizona.

[kip_]

Particularly https://azwatermaps.azwater.gov/gwsiweb/

[soperj]

Yes.

[soperj]

> I call that putting your money where your mouth is.

Others would say "A fool and his money are soon parted".

[benoliver999]

"These people" are generally called upon when the community is struggling to find water.

[naikrovek]

the depth of the water table is fairly well known throughout the world, and it is not like a series of underwater rivers which are easily missed; the water table is called a "table" because it is very large and very flat.

if you are within 100 miles of a natural body of water, or in a flood plain, or anywhere that it rains semi-regularly, drilling will get you to a source of water.

there's no magic or divination involved.

[MisterBastahrd]

.... Your grandfather knew that he needed to find soil that wasn't covered in a stone slab and how deep he needed to dig to hit the water table.

That's not woo woo or some kind of super power. That's simply having the experience of having dug a deep hole in the ground a few times.

[0x445442]

When I was younger I witnessed a well witcher find a location with a devining stick. Spooky stuff.

[lost_tourist]

Or as I suspect like where I grew up, if you dig down far enough you will hit water. The professional guys there would just ask "where do you want it?" and 99% of the time there was water there and not that far down.

[candiddevmike]

If you dig deep enough anywhere you'll probably find water eventually.