Reddit reviews Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience

> When was the last time you ran a doubleblind? Even if it was with the dousing rods, do you know what assumptions were made? What hypotheses were and how they were nullified? Or are you blindly following the analysis done by someone else?

So your saying because I didn't do the double blind study myself that "I'm blindly following the analysis by someone else"? I do double blind tests all day long - I'm a software developer and my test subjects are internal customers at the company I work at.

When I watch someone test things - the software always works, however when I deploy it site wide sometimes it doesn't. I know that sometimes I make assumptions that are wildly inaccurate, but my peers who review my work point out my problems all the time and I make changes to fix these issues. When I'm watching often I'll have them click on things that normal users wouldn't. When I'm testing it or I'm watching someone test my program - its not a properly controlled test.

Dousing might work, but the evidence suggests it doesn't. A parapsychologist named Chris French has published several peer reviewed double blind studies about super natural things like dowsing and concluded that dowsers cannot actually find water. Don't take his word for it - read the study and conduct the experiments yourself - its right here - you can watch him conduct the study on youtube too.

Conducting a double blind test of whether a bent coat hanger can find treasure is pretty simple. Find some treasure around the house (that a friend can bury), find an unbiased friend and have him hide said treasure without you looking and have another friend watch you find the treasure with the bent coat hanger. The 3rd friend won't be able to give you any context clues to find the treasure and the second friend won't be there either to do the same. That's a rational/logical way to approach something.

The double blind study is really what makes the scientific method a reasonable way to find truth. And what it doesn't find (because mistakes were made) - peer review will find. None of your examples actually investigate truth.

Example A and B stop at the evidence presented to them, and neither actually proceeded to investigate these claims themselves - which is the next logical step.