Anyone for a million dollars?
You might already know about it, but for a long time, the James Randi Foundation has been offering a million dollars to anyone who can prove dowsing actually works.
First question from skeptics is, ‘Why has no-one claimed it?’
Conclusion from first question is, ‘Dowsing must obviously be false, otherwise someone would be one million dollars richer’.
There, that’s wrapped that up nicely and so we can move on to the next item…. Except it’s not that simple. (But things rarely are that simple, are they?)
Let’s back up here a bit. Now, as far as I know, no-one has got any money from James Randi (an ex-magician / illusionist) but that doesn’t prove anything at all.
Oh! There’s that ‘P’ word again! Proof! How do you prove anything to someone who doesn’t believe in it to begin with?
I think I’ll call it the “Great-Aunt Matilda Syndrome”. (Calling anything a syndrome makes it sound more official, doesn’t it?) The reason for this name is that, suppose you have a Great Aunt and she is called Matilda (although that’s not mandatory) and you are trying to explain something like the Butterfly Effect of Chaos Theory. (You know, the one where a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and causes a hurricane in Japan or somewhere nearby.) Can you prove it to Matilda? No. Do you believe it works? Pretty much. Can you explain how it works to her? Not a hope. And the clincher is…Does she believe in it? Not a chance, although she will be polite with you because you are related.
Same thing with dowsing. Matilda,…Oops, sorry, James Randi, doesn’t believe in dowsing and you can’t explain it to him but you’re pretty darned sure it exists. How could you ever hope to prove it? Answer: you can’t, because if it really challenges his ideas too much, then he is going to feel ill and queasy and get upset and take to his bed because the world has just changed and it’s not like it was when he was a girl. (Blast. that’s Matilda again. Sorry!)
Now the clever bit is where Randi offers the money because the sheer size of it makes the ‘failure’ of anyone more obvious and thus dowsing is ‘obviously’ a fake and dowsers are charlatans because they’re not rich.
The only part of this whole scenario which is screwed up (because I can accept the Matilda Syndrome easily enough) is where the skeptics say that because the money has not been claimed, logically it must mean that dowsing is rubbish. Unfortunately, there’s simply not enough evidence to prove that. All it really means is that no-one has, as yet, successfully persuaded an aging Great Aunt that such things as butterflies have powerful wings.
The lack of claimants only shows the lack of interest in trying to be nice to an aged relative and allowing them their dotty little habits. After all, they won’t always be around.
But dowsing will!
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