Well, Mr. Devil, one might ask you the same question. You've promoted the Half a Dead Fish Dowsing Gospel, but don't recall that you've told anyone where to send the money to buy a copy.
I'm here to debunk LRL fraud, to use the LRL forum as a laboratory for observing what it is about human nature that causes people so easily become deluded by nonsense, and occasionally to steer someone to a forum where things that actually work are discussed if the forum-denizen happens to be interested in things that work and landed here by mistake.
For instance, if a person wanted a 555 circuit to do something useful, and therefore it mattered whether it was done well or poorly, there are forums (for example the Geotech forums) where knowledgeable people discuss such things.
On the LRL forums, people publish schematics of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with locating metals or valuables at a distance, the circuits are always extraordinarily crude and there is no interest in how to do a competent design that might serve a useful purpose even if not that of locating metals or valuables at a distance. My favorite example of this genre are the low frequency receivers (usually inductive). You can buy well designed low frequency receivers, but they're of no use for fake dowsing because they have identifiable signal responses. To be used for fake dowsing a receiver needs either a mechanical swivelly thingy (what the circuit does is irrelevant), or to be so uselessly noisy and drifty that its output is pretty much like rolling dice and with enough imagination you can pretend that the readings have something to do with "gold ions" or whatever your pseudoscientific belief du jour is.
Listening to the explanations is like listening to a gambler explain how his lucky streaks work: the guy is always borrowing money from his buddies and not paying it back and despite all that the guy hasn't discovered the obvious-- which is that he doesn't know crraapp about gambling, its the slicks who keep cleaning him out who understand gambling.
So what keeps incompetent gamblers in the game? There's something they want to be true, even though they know it's false, and their loyalty is to their wants rather than to knuckling under to Reality. The more they invest in the screwup, they more they believe that "I can't quit now, I've got so much invested in it!". (The slicks who are cleaning him out know this is what he's thinking and keep him in the game by pandering to the delusion.) The fallacy that you can "get your money back" by throwing good money after bad is so broadly accepted that you hear supposedly rational businesspeople use that line of reasoning to justify outright financial stupidity. Idjit investors, the money's gone! it's not bait still on a hook that you can reel back in! LRL'ers merely represent an extreme example of what is actually everyday experience, it even happens in the worlds of national and international politics and finance.
The world is governed by superstition, Mr. Devil. You and I probably agree on that much, and what we disagree on is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. The world is a pretty big laboratory, so when a person wants a small laboratory to put superstition under a microscope, LRL forums serve the purpose well.
--Dave J.
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