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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Dowsing works?

Oil companies use it (or at least did in the past) so the implication is that it works, yeah.

Are you sure this is not some kind of parallel construction scam where for some reason someone in the pipeline is trying to hide how they really made the discovery?

I don't think so but I can't prove it's never been used that way. I don't think the oil companies need parallel construction, though, they have a lot of other methods of searching for oil that are public.

If you hang around people in the oil and natural gas industry for long enough, you will find one who says ‘oh, we hired a Russian guy who’s the only one who can still do this technique and he found us our big strike’. This sounds like parallel construction to me, and I’ve never heard of dowsing being bragged about.

Why do you think they would be parallel constructing, to protect unknown technical knowledge?

I'm pretty confident dowsing been used to (attempt to) find oil in the past, though. I know someone who used to work in the industry, a very long time ago, and he talked about dowsing in that context, although it might have only been for water.

If you get any of your pals to cop to dowsing (or to know of dowsing being done) you should report back.

I think it’s parallel constructing because the mechanism is often something physically implausible, like ‘he knows how to run an x-ray with a gamma ray laser’ or some other Soviet super science fallen into a lone individual type trope. These are smart enough people to understand why you would want a gamma ray laser X-ray but rely on nobody wanting to double check whether it’s physically possible to build. It wouldn’t shock me if one of them came up with a story like that off of not wanting to admit using dowsing though.

And there’s a lot of small companies who’ve specialized in buying wells abandoned by the big dogs and getting the last drop of oil or gas out of them; they’re not going to want to disclose how they figure out which ones they make money off of.

The kinds of people involved in the oil industry probably would not use dowsing as the parallel construction.

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