Talk:Committee for Skeptical Inquiry/Archive 1

message: 1.  CSICOP had a policy for many years of not conducting any investigations itself, only publishing the results of investigations by others.  This policy was because of the controversy generated by its Mars Effect U.S. test and painful parting of ways with former Executive Council member Dennis Rawlins.  CSICOP has funded investigations since Joe Nickell joined the full-time staff in Amherst.
2.  CSICOP was originally founded with seed money from the American Humanist Association, while Paul Kurtz was editor of its magazine, The Humanist.  CSICOP was founded after the considerable response generated by Kurtz's "Objections to Astrology" statement which was issued in the September/October 1975 issue of The Humanist.  This statement led to the Mars effect tests (the Zelen test, published in The Humanist, and the test of U.S. sports champions, published in the Skeptical Inquirer).
3.  CSICOP has been a target of lawsuits by Uri Geller (James Randi was the primary defendant), which CSICOP won.  There have been a number of other lawsuits that have involved CSICOP and local skeptical groups; most recent is the lawsuit by "Jane Doe" (real identity Nicole Taus) against Elizabeth Loftus, Melvin Guyer, CSICOP, the Skeptical Inquirer, the Center for Inquiry West, and Carol Tavris, regarding articles by Loftus & Guyer and Tavris published in the Skeptical Inquirer.
4.  It is worth comparing and contrasting CSICOP with similar organizations, such as Shermer's Skeptics Society, the Society for Scientific Exploration, and former CSICOP co-chairman and original Skeptical Inquirer editor Marcello Truzzi's Center for Scientific Anomalies Research (now defunct since Truzzi's death).  It is also worth mentioning that several of CSICOP's Executive Council members ran a predecessor organization, Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal (RSEP)--Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman, James Randi, and Marcello Truzzi--which was founded in 1975.
Lippard 16:08, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

message: From the article:
:Oddly enough both groups are convinced (beyond a doubt?) the complexities of mind and emotion can readily be discounted, paranormal phenomena can, and must, be produced on demand. (Would they expect the same from heart breaking sorrow, ultimate despair, and successful suicide?) Science marches on?
I'm not sure what this means, but it doesn't sound very NPOV to me.
—Paul A 02:58, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV

message: I was near the Fouke, Arkansas area, asked about a Bigfoot, some guy asked if I was one of those "skeptics". If I was, he would've shot ME. Yeah, No Wonder I nearly got shot while examining this matter myself. This is NOT vandalisim, just what a angered man had stated. I'm NO longer in that area. Thanks a lot CSICOP/Skeptical Inquirer. Martial Law 08:47, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hmmm... shouldn't you "thank" the crackpot with the gun rather than his potential victims? --Hob Gadling 14:35, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: No Wonder/ Thanks a lot

message: I just spent about half an hour at the CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview site, which is linked at the end of the csicop article. To whoever added that link: You owe me 30 minutes of my life, goddamnit!
If anyone knows what that dingbat author's point is, you should go over there and hit it with a shovel, tie it up with string, put it in a box and hand it to the author. I guarantee you the (dingbat) author will say "Huh! So that's what a point looks like, eh? I ain't never seen one o' them before!" KarlBunker 18:10, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I didn't spend as much time as yu did, but I think his point is that he doesn't like CSICOP. :-) Bubba73 (talk), 18:46, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview" external link 

message: Could somebody more proficient than I turn the reference to Carl Sagan into a link to his entry on Wikipedia?
:His name appears numerous times in the article, and several of them are already Wikilinked. It would not be appropriate to Wikilink all of them. Is there a particular one that should be Wikilinked? You can look at the code of one of those that is linked and then use that method. -- Fyslee 19:04, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I see your point. Another point of Wiki protocol I'll add to the mental hopper. --Matthew Treder 18:25, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Turn Carl Sagan into a link? 

message: Your comments are getting unnecessarily long again. Please try to avoid repeating yourself and to stay on topic. I know I've failed in the last regard myself on occasion, and I apologize.
Quoting your remarks re. your edits: 
a) adding the notion that C is media oriented in the intro;
:As I've explained, the contents of 30 years of Skeptical Inquirer show that it is factually incorrect to portray CSICOP as primarily oriented toward media watch-dogging. It is also POV to remove the quotation of the organization's own statement of their purpose.
b) removing the claim that C conducts scientific investigations while keeping the claim that C conducts investigations
:A factually incorrect change, as the contents of 30 years of Skeptical Inquirer again show.
c) removing two long-winded and pretty superfluous (in this article) pargaraphs detailing an analogy intended to show the different evidence required by skeptics and proponents of the paranormal (as if the two were mutually exclusive)""
:These paragraphs describe the purpose and philosophy behind CSICOP's activities. There is no reason to remove them, except that they show skepticism in a favorable light.
I have changed the start of the criticism section from "CSiCOP's investigation..." to "CSICOPS's activities...".
:I agree that the word "activities" is okay.
You also removed the names of some notable CSICOP members from an early paragraph. These names are repeated in the long list of CSICOP Fellows, but removing them from the earlier prose paragraph serves no purpose except to remove something that demonstrates some of the prestige of CSICOP.
You also added an additional criticism of a CSICOP investigation. With the material you removed, this addition places the weight of the article too far in the direction of criticism. KarlBunker 04:09, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Davkal, if you would care to delete your above comment and rewrite it without the personal attacks and sarcasm, I will read it. As it is I stopped at the halfway point. I have no interest in trading schoolyard barbs with you. KarlBunker 10:58, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  POV continued 

message: This section should have an addition because:
Sagan’s phrase is meaningless nonsense. Mere populist jargon - it sounds good but is completely devoid of meaning. The veracity of any claim must be tested against all the available evidence. Big, little, red, blue, wet, dry, spikey, smooth, for or against - all the evidence, without fear or favour, must be assessed. There is no such thing as “extraordinary” evidence and there is no such thing as limiting the evidence for any claim to a particular type of evidence that doesn’t exist anyway. Sagan’s claim is in fact an extraordinary requirement that can never be met. It represents antiscience at it worst. If the standards of evidence of CSI rest on Sagan’s nonsense, then they truly are a pseudoscientific organisation.
But of course I would not expect Wikipedia to promote science above pseudoscience. The latter seems to be their forte.
And while we are on the matter of pseudoscience, CSI and their cohort have proved themselves again and again to be advocates of pseudoscience as long as they have been around [Hatzopoulos, D. (2012) Skeptics, pelicanists and Prozac explanations].
As long as Wikipedia allow the pseudoscientists to create their agenda, so will science, democracy and the people be the losers. Discuss.
Theatozofeverything (talk) 04:33, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia articles are based on published reliable sources, and not on the personal opinions of contributors. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:39, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Personal opinion"? You mistake me for a member of CSI. My argument either has veracity or it does not. If it does, then acknowledge it. If it does not, then you will be able to provide a reason why it does not.Theatozofeverything (talk) 05:26, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Whether your personal opinion has veracity or not is irrelevant. Wikipedia articles are based on published reliable sources, and not on the personal opinions of contributors. This is how Wikipedia works. AndyTheGrump (talk) 07:31, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Standards of evidence 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hi, was wondering if the abovementioned section is needed, as its not shown to connect to the committee in the article. 19:08, 23 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Independent Investigation Group 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I have finished adding all the Awards given by CSI up to 2015. It was tedious work, I searched through the CD that goes up to 2005 every issue for the word "Award" in order to find every entry of an award. I also searched the CSICOP website. I was given a copy of the CSI spreadsheet by Barry Karr and used that as a cross-reference to what I was finding in the S.I. magazines and CSI website. I did come across a few anomalies and done my best to be correct. Here are a few things to note. There is no documentation that Marcia Angell was given the Distinguished Skeptic award in 2002 as well as Marvin Minsky getting the In Praise of Reason Award. It is on the spreadsheet that I was given, and people at CSI remember it happening. Both happened in 2002 at the same conference, and I have searched S.I. and there is no recap or follow-up talking about that conference. I think it was just overlooked. I have noted on the WP page that a citation is needed, but I really don't think there is one to be found. Also According to Paul Kurtz's article in S.I. Lin Zixin won the Distinguished Skeptic Award in 2000, but the spreadsheet says it is the "In Praise of Reason" Award. I'm noting it here on Talk, but I added it on the WP page as the In Praise of Reason, believing that Kurtz misreported, there were two other Distinguished that year (Barry Williams and Joe Nickell) and no other Praise of Reason recipients, so strongly believe that Zixin is a Praise of Reason winner. I have also been to every winner's WP page and mentioned that they were recipients of CSI awards. If the person did not have a WP page, then I tried to leave the mention on the WP page of their workplace. KUSA(TV), Columbus-Citizen Journal, Sacramento Bee are examples of this. Winners Jack Smith and Barry Williams have names very common and I was not sure if they have WP pages or not, CSICOP did not give enough information in their write-up for me to know who these people are. I also hoped to find more information about each award and have supplied it where I could find citations to prove it. The Public Education, Distinguished Skeptic and Frontiers of Science and Tech are missing this information. I communicated with Barry Karr and Kendrick Frazier asking for more information about Robert B. Balles and was informed by Karr that he was a donor of CSI who bequeathed the money for this award in his name. I could not discover much more about Balles, other than a few mentions in S.I. that he was a religious man. I felt that wasn't really relevant to the award, it would be nice to be able to expand a bit talking about who Balles was and why he decided to donate in this way, was he someone who loved books? Was he inspired by the first winner Andrew Skolnick? No idea, but if found please add to the WP page. So this is all I can think of, this took me hours and hours to complete. So PLEASE keep it up to date long after I'm gone. These recipients have done excellent work, and deserve that they are remembered for their achievements, as well as the history of scientific skepticism and Wikipedia.Sgerbic (talk) 06:07, 18 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  CSI Awards 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: In Praise of Reason Award, Marvin Minsky is NOT linked to his Wiki page and should be. 74.88.209.234 (talk) 12:02, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: He was actually already linked in another list below, but MOS:DUPLINK allows it. I found a citation for it while I was at it. --Krelnik (talk) 12:59, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 17 February 2017 

message: amongst a lot of otehr productive edits, i flagged this article on august 19 2016, because it contained too many primary sources.
the next day aug 20 it was silently deleted, really without giving any reason. The person may not have understood what primary sources are. so i am replacing teh flag.--Wuerzele (talk) 02:15, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  primary sources