In Britain, until surprisingly recent times, water engineers had been known to use dowsing rods to help find water pipes. As far as I can tell, it's a... method... that helped them to stop overthinking the problem, and subconsciously look at where the the pipe's likely to be, given the many small clues indicating previous engineering work.
The poster talking about finding water in a desert presumably values the water. The studies are more interested in two related questions: the mechanism of the technique and whether its practitioners understand it. To the latter, the answer is an emphatic 'no'.
For the former, the studies use various experimental schema to evaluate hypothesized mechanisms, each time yielding a refutation of those mechanisms. Going from a refutation of specific mechanisms to a rejection of the practice is extrapolation, not sound science.
Part of living in an intelligible universe is accepting that there are phenomena that await discovery, description, and generalization. Whether that is true of this 'dowsing' technique is a separate question. When a flat-Earther fails to address time zones, distance to the horizon, stars, great circle routes over the poles, etc., this dismissiveness is justified, but that does not appear to be the case from what you have cited, and the practice of science is worse off for you insinuating otherwise.
Edit: All of this is apart from the utility of someone doggedly pursuing a course of action which he is convinced will bear fruit as contrasted to someone timidly sampling among options without ever making equivalent commitment.
He didn't indicate any magnitude, your subconscious mind interpreted that part, merged it into your experience, and here we are. As the saying goes: perception is reality (a technically true statement, but the particular meaning of the word "is" (there are many) is very important to understand this saying properly). This is not the only error in your comment by the way.
I am curious: how many hours have you invested in studying consciousness, and in what ways? How about psychedelics, have you substantial experience (and do you study your experiences, and those of others, or just do it for fun)? How about meditation? How about epistemology (ie: Gettier Problems(!!!), non-binary logic, phenomenology, cultural norms of cognition (which puts limits on how accurately/soundly you are taught and even ~allowed to think), etc)? How about Direct vs Indirect Realism (did you even consider this, at all while you were writing your comment)?
Are you going to learn a lesson from this and exert effort in the future to distinguish between shared reality and your personal local "reality", culturally and ideologically conditioned Human Being? Or, are you going to continue behaving inline with your peers here, the easy and pleasurable approach, putting people like me who are trapped on this planet (which is warming up due to your ideologies) with you people at ever increasing levels of risk?
edit: fixed spelling, misplaced brackets
Switched to dowsing, found water within minutes.
If I clamed I had a pair of glasses that improved your driving, the control would not be driving blidfolded.