As much as I like to criticize the NYT, I think this is unfair. The original article makes it clear that it's BS. The article says clearly, "scientists and groundwater experts make clear that the dowsers’ methods are unscientific and amount to a kind of hocus-pocus".
What I think people don't understand here is that the NYT doesn't just come out and call people assholes. A traditional journalist is not supposed to insert themselves into the frame to that extent. The highfalutin' journalist approach to the problem is to paint a sympathetic picture of the asshole in ways that make it clear that they are an asshole.
I don't think that does make it clear that it's BS, unless you come from a very particular pro-science mindset that's common in our circles but far from universal. You'll note that quote is immediately followed by two wineyard managers explaining how their professional experience suggests the scientists are wrong. I'm confident a substantial number of people would read this article and see it as an example of scientists ignoring the value of practical experience and traditional wisdom.
Compare something like their Aduhelm article from today (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-ad...). The NYT isn't quite insulting Biogen, true, but they're being much more confrontational and not giving Biogen any space to frame the story how they might prefer.
I think this depends a lot on whom you think things aren't being made clear to. Given who the NYT audience is (72% have a university degree, 91% identify as Democrats), I think most of the readership is going to be in the pro-science mindset.
More that that, regular readers of anything learn to interpret in context. E.g., I've long read The Economist. People reading one article there might see them as dull. But as a regular reader, I know they can be brutal; you just have know which particular dry turns of phrase indicate the brutality. I think most NYT subscribers will know how to parse NYT articles and pick up the condescension and undermining in the article.
Making a strong case for the desperation of the drought and advocating for practical solutions? Or helping con artists steal huge sums of money from desperate people?
That approach just helps con artists rip off desperate ignorant people, promoting a worldview that magic is a viable alternative to scientific reality, a view held by a dangerously large and easily exploited percentage of the population.
I don't think so. The NYT's customers know how to read an NYT article like this. I expect very few will come away with the notion that they should hire a dowser, and that the bulk would read it as intended.
If you have evidence otherwise, I'd be interested to see it.
You lack major introspective skills and self awareness if you think your beliefs are the "correct" ones and the rest of the world is full of fools. This kind of attitude has been on the rise and is a large part why public trust of our institutions is falling. No one needs to be protected from bad ideas they are fully capable of reaching that conclusion on their own.
"Scientific reality" is in the eyes of the beholder, unfortunately. Plenty of people will happily accept 'the science says' type statements if it's something they already believe in.
Show them something that goes against those beliefs, and suddenly you'll be fielding skepticisms of sample sizes, P-values, the ideological leanings of the principal investigators, etc.
People do not live their lives governed by scientific knowledge, and ignoring that isn't going to change the status quo.
Why's that? As a California resident, I'm very interested in local pseudoscience. As the article suggests, there's an important contrast between the Bay Area's high-tech reputation and what's happening in the region.
Why not though? It's happening. They report things that are happening. The story says about half a dozen times that the technique doesn't work and quotes as many geologists as it does witches. Popular belief in superstition is still newsworthy. As is reporting on religious movements or QAnon.
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.
That used to be the case but in the last ten to fifteen years the prestige press has been moving away from these norms (under the influence of a generation of journalism professors that became dominant ten to fifteen years before that.)
There are two subsequent sentences in the first paragraph. One is complete bullshit, while the other has correct reasoning. It really doesn't help when skeptic articles do this.
> The very notion of dowsing — that an above-ground stick will react to the presence of something hundreds of feet below — breaks the laws of physics.
Really? It breaks the laws of physics? Tell that to my gravimeter. Oh you are saying a human with a simple wooden stick is not a gravimeter? Idk they are quite complicated. They can be many things. Maybe they can be a gravimeter too?
> Every single controlled test of the practice has failed, yielding results indistinguishable from chance.
This is the important bit. We know that "dowsing" doesn't work because we tried it many times, carefully, and so far it never worked better than chance. It has nothing to do with breaking the laws of physics.
A human with stick (in the colloquial sense, they ones used by Dow sets) would absolutely not be able to perceive the differences in gravity with/without the presence of underground water. The signal to noise ratio would be too high to know the difference. In that sense I don’t think it’s too much of a exaggeration to say it defies the law of physics IMO
> The signal to noise ratio would be too high to know the difference.
That's a very good reasoning why it is an unlikely thing to be. But the sensitivity of humans to gravitational differences is not a law of physics. This is a very important distinction.
The phrase "breaks the laws of physics" is not just a rhetorical flourish.
If I point at a go-kart looking thing and say "that thing can go 0.8 Mach" that's a practical impossibility. For many reasons it is very unlikely, to be true. But does not break the laws of physics. (Who knows, maybe it has a nuke under it, which can loft it that fast for one glorious moment of go-karting fame.)
If I point at the same go-kart looking object and say "that thing can go 1.2c" that is a whole different ballpark. It might still happen, but if it happens that will make us re-evaluate nearly everything we think we know about how the universe works. This is what it means that something "breaks the laws of physics".
A long enough, massive enough stick could theoretically be a gravimeter. You'd just have to be so impossibly perceptive (or use an interferometer) that you'd notice the difference in gravity each half of the stick experiences.
No question dowsing is pseudoscience. But it's interesting that the dowsing concept of hanging weights off a stick is quite similar to the first scientific gravimeter, which used a pendulum in the 1670s.
Also Clarke's first and second laws in action: "LaCoste's most famous invention is the ship, and aircraft-mounted gravimeter. …this invention was considered impossible until LaCoste demonstrated it." Clarke's third law is asking the black brick in your hand "Siri, what's the local gravity here?"
That first sentence hit me the same way. We have all kinds of above ground fancy sticks that react to the presence of things hundreds of feet below. It doesn't break any laws of physics!
What matters is that, as you note, we've tested this pretty thoroughly and under controlled conditions, and have strong evidence that dowsing is bullshit.
This is the same defense used by practitioners of astrology -- that humans are somehow able to unconsciously perceive and be affected by infinitesimal gravitational forces.
This isn’t both sides treatment, this is reporting on the desperation of vineyard managers in a drought that would shell out around $1000 (when geologists charge several times that) for bogus services. Other commenters have problems with the NYT including the personal wacky views of some dowsers and vineyard managers but what’s the alternative? Omitting them? I want to know as a reader the people behind throwing money away for these dowsers and why, and I got that information instead of being babied by a reporter.
Not once does the article mention efficacy of geologists or dowsers because I didn’t think that’s what the article was about. It read more like, “Hey some vineyards are hiring crazy people and here are some of their claims that are widely disputed. Weird world right?.” An example is when they contrast the different feelings dowsers get: one feels hot like a battery, another feels cold chills, and yet another just swings a pendulum on a map and marks it with a sharpie like a magic spell.
People who read this and think they want a dowser will find another article or blog to succumb to confirmation bias anyway. Let’s not take our frustration with misinformation out on normal reporting.
I think you're importing context from somewhere else here. I gave the article another read-over to be sure, and I didn't see anything about desperation or cost differentials. The dowsers and vineyard managers seem to me to be making a direct claim that dowsing is the most effective way to find water and geologists don't know what they're talking about.
Spot on that I am bringing the national discussion around the California drought into context while reading the article.
On costs:
> Some California farmers who pay for the service, however, say it often provides a cheaper alternative to traditional methods, such as hiring a geologist or prospector.
> He planned to charge at least $1,400 for his visit. A geologist had quoted the same site at a minimum of $6,500
On desperation:
> (The Subtitle) Amid California’s drought, desperate landowners and managers are turning to those who practice an ancient, disputed method for locating water.
> His busy schedule is a sign of the desperation of ranchers, vineyard owners and land managers as California reels from a crippling drought that has depleted aquifers, shrunken crops and forced some farmers to sell off their water rights.
> “There are economic issues, personal beliefs and desperation factors going into the decision to try dowsing,” Ben Frech, a spokesman for the National Ground Water Association, said in an email. While the group understood that despair could lead to “exploring all options,” ultimately, he said, the method was a waste of time and money.
On the flip side, although one manager claims that they’ve never hired a geologist, they didn’t claim geologists “don’t know what they’re talking about”. Instead, they allude to the success of dowsers, which is later explained as a product of luck, the multitude of underground wells in California, and that “years of experience in the industry would also have developed a familiarity with the landscape”. I don’t think this is a case where vineyards and farmers are rejecting science, they’re welcoming what they see as a viable cheaper alternative to find water before they drill. It’s easy to read between the lines and think that these vineyard managers are the kinds of people who would reject science altogether, but that’s not in the article, it’s importing context.
I'm an atheist. But this is perhaps a trickier issue than it might seem at first glance.
Yes, the claims of "water witches" are objectively untrue.
In a very real sense, it is fraudulent to charge for such "services."
However, the supernatural claims of any religion are equally untrue. And just about any major organized religion expects money from its followers either directly or indirectly in terms of donations, tithing, tax breaks, etc. In an objective sense these practices are all just as fraudulent as a "water witch" charging for their services.
And this is where the trickiness arises - do we want to single out some religions for debunking, while allowing others' claims to go unquestioned?
I don't like the idea of marks forking over money for these fraudulent water dowsing services provided by "water witches", nor the idea of a publication like the NYT lending any credence whatsoever to such antiscience.
But I'm also not in love with giving established world religions a free pass while picking on the smaller and less centralized religions. It's not too long ago that we literally burned "witches" here in America, and unfortunately it is common throughout history.
I don't believe dowsing is real - but Arthur C. Clarke had made a statement at one point that it didn't seem completely outside the realm of possibility that there could be an evolutionary advantage for people to have some subconscious ability to notice environmental signals of the presence of water (assuming such signals exist.)
These statements were made back in the days of "In Search Of ...", etc., when there were a lot of books and shows about pseudo-scientific phenomena like The Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Astronauts, Bigfoot, etc. It really wasn't all that long ago that it wasn't considered complete insane to be studying these phenomena and have details published in peer-review journals
I've done a decent amount of reading on using ecological cues to infer stuff about what's below ground. For applications such as mining, construction and farming the science is well understood. The dowsers are probably just taking a good guess about the substrate based on what they can see above. Between plant life, evidence of erosion, soil type, climate and everything else you can observe at the surface you can combine things you know about those things and use logic in order to rule things out and make some surprisingly accurate predictions about environmental conditions that you cannot directly observe.
The dowsers can probably "detect" water better than a random guess even if they can't explain how because they're probably observing the ecology on a subconscious level and have a lot of practice. That said, I'd bet money on the scientists being right about the whole rods and gravity thing being pure BS.
So you're saying that even though scientists have completely debunked the idea that water witches' success rate is above random chance, you would still bet money on the unscientific idea that the dowsers do better than chance.
Does this give you any insight into a person who would bet their life on the unscientific idea that vaccines are dangerous?
I don't understand either position, so I'm looking to you for more details.
A similar explanation, the "ideomotor effect," has been put forward for the Ouija board and several other divination techniques that sometimes seem to do better than chance or produce other kinds of "spooky" results.
The idea is that you have subconscious thought processes, sensory awareness, or knowledge, and when you put yourself into an observation/motor feedback loop this subtile cognition can influence fine motor responses which are then amplified by feedback as you observe your own movements. You're putting weak neural "noise" through a feedback amplifier, but the noise is not random and could contain information. There is no way to control for this because the test is not blind.
It's become popular in recent years to chase "chains of synchronicity." A very entertaining semi-documentary about this can be found here:
A very similar phenomenon could be at work in that. It might start with subconsciously biased paradolia and as you follow a "chain of synchronicities" you are running an amplification and filtration feedback loop similar to what happens when you watch a planchette move across a Ouija board or watch a dowsing rod move. You've grabbed a set of weak neural signals and amplified them.
It's not supernatural but it might be neurologically and cognitively interesting. I've had the intuition for a long time that all creativity probably involves processes like this. An artist or a musician doesn't just emerge with a fully formed work from nowhere. They "noodle around..."
BTW...
Hellier is a great bit of independent film. I've compared it to the cult sci-fi film "Primer" in terms of quality, originality, and creativity on a shoestring budget, and if you liked that film you'll probably like it. Also heard it described by someone as "like Ghost Hunters or Paranormal State but for thinking people." It's a fun ride if you suspend disbelief. There's a scene in season two where a practicing witch uses a transcranial magnetic stimulation device to try to talk to aliens. It's worth it just for that, gives it a hint of "post-cyberpunk."
Edit:
Has anyone ever experimented with these techniques as a cognitive or creativity enhancer without the "woo woo" assumptions? Treat it like a brain hack to get at subconscious thought processes, sort of like what you can do with psychedelics but without the drugs.
Thanks for splitting the gap in an illuminating way.
My experience with "chains of synchronicity" is they quickly become obsessive and drained of subconscious lifeblood. For me it's word games, chains of acronyms and anagrams, reading meaning into licence plates. I noticed the same tendency in Scott Alexander (of the late SSC)'s fiction, where he plays with words in an almost numerological way.
I can see how it would be fun as an activity, but the view from the tic/compulsion side of the line is less pleasant.
> How that ever persisted into the 20th Century and to now is perplexing but probably says a lot about human nature.
Because if it costs $1,400, and if it works then you make hundreds of millions of dollars, then even if you believe the chances of it working are close to zero it's still economically rational to try. Those kinds of returns are literally like getting a chance to go back to 2010 to buy bitcoin.
There are four main explanations for how rods move during dowsing.
1. Random chance.
2. The operator is a sensor and the rods the indicator. The person moves the rods unconsciously in response to some internal perception.
3. The rods are moved from outside by supernatural forces.
4. The person moves the rod unconsciously and doesn't sense anything external.
I have tried dowsing and think its a either 2 or 4. It's definitely the operator moving the rods. The question then becomes why.
It's within the realm of nature that organisms can sense light, magnetism, humidity, heat etc. It's also likely that we could indicate where things are from a kind of unconscious intuition or a guess of where something could be.
If you were to do an experiment, I'd suggest using buried electrical wires indoors or outside, as these someone should have actual plans for.
In my experiments with a group of people using a pendulum, the targets identified were basically the same as when asked a different group of people consciously to choose. In other words, #4.
Readit News
What I think people don't understand here is that the NYT doesn't just come out and call people assholes. A traditional journalist is not supposed to insert themselves into the frame to that extent. The highfalutin' journalist approach to the problem is to paint a sympathetic picture of the asshole in ways that make it clear that they are an asshole.
Compare something like their Aduhelm article from today (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/health/alzheimers-drug-ad...). The NYT isn't quite insulting Biogen, true, but they're being much more confrontational and not giving Biogen any space to frame the story how they might prefer.
More that that, regular readers of anything learn to interpret in context. E.g., I've long read The Economist. People reading one article there might see them as dull. But as a regular reader, I know they can be brutal; you just have know which particular dry turns of phrase indicate the brutality. I think most NYT subscribers will know how to parse NYT articles and pick up the condescension and undermining in the article.
I kinda wonder if ANY portrayal of these people would be ok with the author if it didn't constantly have notes about how foolish they were ...
Making a strong case for the desperation of the drought and advocating for practical solutions? Or helping con artists steal huge sums of money from desperate people?
If you have evidence otherwise, I'd be interested to see it.
Show them something that goes against those beliefs, and suddenly you'll be fielding skepticisms of sample sizes, P-values, the ideological leanings of the principal investigators, etc.
People do not live their lives governed by scientific knowledge, and ignoring that isn't going to change the status quo.
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.
So? Fraudsters are human, though, as obvious a statement as that is.
> The very notion of dowsing — that an above-ground stick will react to the presence of something hundreds of feet below — breaks the laws of physics.
Really? It breaks the laws of physics? Tell that to my gravimeter. Oh you are saying a human with a simple wooden stick is not a gravimeter? Idk they are quite complicated. They can be many things. Maybe they can be a gravimeter too?
> Every single controlled test of the practice has failed, yielding results indistinguishable from chance.
This is the important bit. We know that "dowsing" doesn't work because we tried it many times, carefully, and so far it never worked better than chance. It has nothing to do with breaking the laws of physics.
"Birds Can See Earth's Magnetic Fields, And Now We Know How That's Possible" (https://www.sciencealert.com/birds-see-magnetic-fields-crypt...)
The only reason you can state with confidence that a human with stick can't detect water underground is that they've never been able to do it.
That's a very good reasoning why it is an unlikely thing to be. But the sensitivity of humans to gravitational differences is not a law of physics. This is a very important distinction. The phrase "breaks the laws of physics" is not just a rhetorical flourish.
If I point at a go-kart looking thing and say "that thing can go 0.8 Mach" that's a practical impossibility. For many reasons it is very unlikely, to be true. But does not break the laws of physics. (Who knows, maybe it has a nuke under it, which can loft it that fast for one glorious moment of go-karting fame.)
If I point at the same go-kart looking object and say "that thing can go 1.2c" that is a whole different ballpark. It might still happen, but if it happens that will make us re-evaluate nearly everything we think we know about how the universe works. This is what it means that something "breaks the laws of physics".
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/icebridge/instruments/gra...
No question dowsing is pseudoscience. But it's interesting that the dowsing concept of hanging weights off a stick is quite similar to the first scientific gravimeter, which used a pendulum in the 1670s.
Also Clarke's first and second laws in action: "LaCoste's most famous invention is the ship, and aircraft-mounted gravimeter. …this invention was considered impossible until LaCoste demonstrated it." Clarke's third law is asking the black brick in your hand "Siri, what's the local gravity here?"
What matters is that, as you note, we've tested this pretty thoroughly and under controlled conditions, and have strong evidence that dowsing is bullshit.
It's bunk.
Not once does the article mention efficacy of geologists or dowsers because I didn’t think that’s what the article was about. It read more like, “Hey some vineyards are hiring crazy people and here are some of their claims that are widely disputed. Weird world right?.” An example is when they contrast the different feelings dowsers get: one feels hot like a battery, another feels cold chills, and yet another just swings a pendulum on a map and marks it with a sharpie like a magic spell.
People who read this and think they want a dowser will find another article or blog to succumb to confirmation bias anyway. Let’s not take our frustration with misinformation out on normal reporting.
On costs: > Some California farmers who pay for the service, however, say it often provides a cheaper alternative to traditional methods, such as hiring a geologist or prospector.
> He planned to charge at least $1,400 for his visit. A geologist had quoted the same site at a minimum of $6,500
On desperation:
> (The Subtitle) Amid California’s drought, desperate landowners and managers are turning to those who practice an ancient, disputed method for locating water.
> His busy schedule is a sign of the desperation of ranchers, vineyard owners and land managers as California reels from a crippling drought that has depleted aquifers, shrunken crops and forced some farmers to sell off their water rights.
> “There are economic issues, personal beliefs and desperation factors going into the decision to try dowsing,” Ben Frech, a spokesman for the National Ground Water Association, said in an email. While the group understood that despair could lead to “exploring all options,” ultimately, he said, the method was a waste of time and money.
On the flip side, although one manager claims that they’ve never hired a geologist, they didn’t claim geologists “don’t know what they’re talking about”. Instead, they allude to the success of dowsers, which is later explained as a product of luck, the multitude of underground wells in California, and that “years of experience in the industry would also have developed a familiarity with the landscape”. I don’t think this is a case where vineyards and farmers are rejecting science, they’re welcoming what they see as a viable cheaper alternative to find water before they drill. It’s easy to read between the lines and think that these vineyard managers are the kinds of people who would reject science altogether, but that’s not in the article, it’s importing context.
Yes, the claims of "water witches" are objectively untrue.
In a very real sense, it is fraudulent to charge for such "services."
However, the supernatural claims of any religion are equally untrue. And just about any major organized religion expects money from its followers either directly or indirectly in terms of donations, tithing, tax breaks, etc. In an objective sense these practices are all just as fraudulent as a "water witch" charging for their services.
And this is where the trickiness arises - do we want to single out some religions for debunking, while allowing others' claims to go unquestioned?
I don't like the idea of marks forking over money for these fraudulent water dowsing services provided by "water witches", nor the idea of a publication like the NYT lending any credence whatsoever to such antiscience.
But I'm also not in love with giving established world religions a free pass while picking on the smaller and less centralized religions. It's not too long ago that we literally burned "witches" here in America, and unfortunately it is common throughout history.
These statements were made back in the days of "In Search Of ...", etc., when there were a lot of books and shows about pseudo-scientific phenomena like The Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Astronauts, Bigfoot, etc. It really wasn't all that long ago that it wasn't considered complete insane to be studying these phenomena and have details published in peer-review journals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI
They most certainly do.
I've done a decent amount of reading on using ecological cues to infer stuff about what's below ground. For applications such as mining, construction and farming the science is well understood. The dowsers are probably just taking a good guess about the substrate based on what they can see above. Between plant life, evidence of erosion, soil type, climate and everything else you can observe at the surface you can combine things you know about those things and use logic in order to rule things out and make some surprisingly accurate predictions about environmental conditions that you cannot directly observe.
The dowsers can probably "detect" water better than a random guess even if they can't explain how because they're probably observing the ecology on a subconscious level and have a lot of practice. That said, I'd bet money on the scientists being right about the whole rods and gravity thing being pure BS.
Dowers are not better than chance. They’re exactly the same as chance!
Does this give you any insight into a person who would bet their life on the unscientific idea that vaccines are dangerous?
I don't understand either position, so I'm looking to you for more details.
The idea is that you have subconscious thought processes, sensory awareness, or knowledge, and when you put yourself into an observation/motor feedback loop this subtile cognition can influence fine motor responses which are then amplified by feedback as you observe your own movements. You're putting weak neural "noise" through a feedback amplifier, but the noise is not random and could contain information. There is no way to control for this because the test is not blind.
It's become popular in recent years to chase "chains of synchronicity." A very entertaining semi-documentary about this can be found here:
https://www.hellier.tv
There's even an app for it called Randonautica.
A very similar phenomenon could be at work in that. It might start with subconsciously biased paradolia and as you follow a "chain of synchronicities" you are running an amplification and filtration feedback loop similar to what happens when you watch a planchette move across a Ouija board or watch a dowsing rod move. You've grabbed a set of weak neural signals and amplified them.
It's not supernatural but it might be neurologically and cognitively interesting. I've had the intuition for a long time that all creativity probably involves processes like this. An artist or a musician doesn't just emerge with a fully formed work from nowhere. They "noodle around..."
BTW...
Hellier is a great bit of independent film. I've compared it to the cult sci-fi film "Primer" in terms of quality, originality, and creativity on a shoestring budget, and if you liked that film you'll probably like it. Also heard it described by someone as "like Ghost Hunters or Paranormal State but for thinking people." It's a fun ride if you suspend disbelief. There's a scene in season two where a practicing witch uses a transcranial magnetic stimulation device to try to talk to aliens. It's worth it just for that, gives it a hint of "post-cyberpunk."
Edit:
Has anyone ever experimented with these techniques as a cognitive or creativity enhancer without the "woo woo" assumptions? Treat it like a brain hack to get at subconscious thought processes, sort of like what you can do with psychedelics but without the drugs.
My experience with "chains of synchronicity" is they quickly become obsessive and drained of subconscious lifeblood. For me it's word games, chains of acronyms and anagrams, reading meaning into licence plates. I noticed the same tendency in Scott Alexander (of the late SSC)'s fiction, where he plays with words in an almost numerological way.
I can see how it would be fun as an activity, but the view from the tic/compulsion side of the line is less pleasant.
To me the article was more about the people / desperation...
Sometimes I think people believe that almost any portrayal that isn't entirely negative of a thing they don't like is 'both sides'.
If it is all to chance anyway, there are probably a lot worse ways to "flip a coin". At least you can feel like you're divining where to dig.
How that ever persisted into the 20th Century and to now is perplexing but probably says a lot about human nature.
Because if it costs $1,400, and if it works then you make hundreds of millions of dollars, then even if you believe the chances of it working are close to zero it's still economically rational to try. Those kinds of returns are literally like getting a chance to go back to 2010 to buy bitcoin.
Do you hire a lottery number picker service?
1. Random chance.
2. The operator is a sensor and the rods the indicator. The person moves the rods unconsciously in response to some internal perception.
3. The rods are moved from outside by supernatural forces.
4. The person moves the rod unconsciously and doesn't sense anything external.
I have tried dowsing and think its a either 2 or 4. It's definitely the operator moving the rods. The question then becomes why.
It's within the realm of nature that organisms can sense light, magnetism, humidity, heat etc. It's also likely that we could indicate where things are from a kind of unconscious intuition or a guess of where something could be.
If you were to do an experiment, I'd suggest using buried electrical wires indoors or outside, as these someone should have actual plans for.
In my experiments with a group of people using a pendulum, the targets identified were basically the same as when asked a different group of people consciously to choose. In other words, #4.