Implications

Lots of people don’t think about the implications of things. To me, this is utterly surprising. For example, take dowsing. There is a lot of interesting evidence that some people really can use dowsing to find out information. Now, if you are saying “oh, that’s ridiculous; why is this person bothering me now? He must be a fool”, then you have utterly and totally missed the point of this idea. It is irrelevant whether it is dowsing, or something else. Get over yourself.

Anyway, if dowsing has validity, then what would be the implications for architecture? For medical research? For medicine? For biology? If you take the simplest example of dowsing, which is the finding of water on land which does not have a water source, it’s obvious that you’re still able to validate that the water source is there; the dowsing just saves us infinite amounts of time, which we can then use elsewhere.

But my experience is that many, many people, if I were to tell them about this dowsing research, many people would take my word for it, that this is probably a real thing. In fact, they are more credulous than I would tend to be, not really wanting any particular evidence (I find that surprising, actually). The exception is when they have a very particular upbringing or training, for example as a scientist, in which case they tend to have a particular bias against the idea. Which, if you really think about it, is also a problem, but okay…

The point is that they will most often believe you, if they have that particular bent. But they are uninterested in what the implications might be. If you were to say, “now, imagine the implications for architecture; for engineering; for biology; for medicine,” they will look at you somewhat blankly. You have to coax it out of them. A pot of potential gold is sitting there, staring at them, and they are saying, “well, this pot looks interesting, I guess I could dump this garbage out of it, and use the pot to plant some of my petunias in”.

That is very very bizarre to me. This, in itself, is symptomatic of many of the problems of our society as it is currently constructed.