[plank_time]

Imagine the article was about a right wing anti-trans activist. The criticism would be that the NYT was providing a platform to someone that doesn’t deserve it.

But this water witch is clearly a fraud. They are giving a platform to someone who does not deserve it because that are ripping off people. They are humanizing a fraudster.

[harpersealtako]

>They are humanizing a fraudster.

So? Fraudsters are human, though, as obvious a statement as that is.

[wpietri]

For sure. And I want to caution against seeing all dowsers as fraudsters. Fraud for me is in the "knows or should have known it's a lie" bucket. But I'm sure a lot of dowsers believe in what they're doing.

As one of the sciencey experts explains, it's perfectly plausible that some dowsers do a decent job because they have a subconscious knowledge of landforms and how they relate to water. So this may not be fraud so much as ignorance of how they actually work.

Given the extent to which the tech industry is coughing up "AI" solutions that are also driven by neural networks, only some of which actually work and the rest work for mysterious reasons, I think we can treat dowsers as human.

[antihero]

I would think that TERFs etc cause and contribute to a significantly larger amount of human suffering than water dousers, though.