Talk:David Viscott

Requesting a citation is not vandalism
First off, User:DoTheRightThing, do not refer to an edit as vandalism if it is not vandalism. Requesting a citation for an uncited statement is not vandalism, and it is a violation of both WP:CIV and WP:NPA to label it as such. Please don't do that again.

Secondly, I stand by my request for a citation for the following sentence:


 * Viscott's style of counseling was hard-hitting yet compassionate, and he often isolated an individual's source of emotional problems in a very short amount of time.

I am sorry, but I absolutely do not believe (without citation) that the host of a call-in show can diagnose a person's emotional issues over the phone, let alone compassionately and "in a very short amount of time." You are going to have to back this one up with a citation. If some people say this about Viscott, that is okay, but then you will have to be clear about who is saying that.

As it stands now, I do not accept the sentence without citation. Your inappropriate labeling of my edit as "vandalism" has rather reduced my patience, and if the sentence is not cited within a couple of days I am inclined to remove it altogether, as per WP:NPOV. Thanks for your attention. --Jaysweet (talk) 16:12, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I was an avid watcher of Viscott's TV show "Getting in Touch" and I can attest to his uncanny ability to very quickly get to the source of his subject's problems. Almost suspiciously so: as if they'd had a long session prior to the actual taping. In any case, it was Viscott's "signature move" and the sentence that you are objecting to, while admittedly without citation, is nevertheless appropriate in, and central to, this article.--Petzl (talk) 10:04, 17 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Then get a citation for it. If Viscott really had an "uncanny ability to very quickly get to the source of his subject's problems," surely some reliable source somewhere at some point in the past 21 years, must have written about it?? --Jaysweet (talk) 15:08, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

I removed the uncited sentence, as I simply do not believe it and nobody has been able to provide a citation in the last three weeks or so. An IP restored it. I am going to undo the IP's edit. Please justify here if you think the sentence should be re-added. Do not re-add it without commenting here. Thanks. --Jaysweet (talk) 16:04, 23 September 2008 (UTC)


 * See the following section. David Spector (talk) 01:11, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

RfC: Uncited sentence about Viscott's abilities
A check of the history will show that me and an IP are edit warring over the inclusion of the following sentence:


 * Viscott's style of counseling was hard-hitting yet compassionate, and he often isolated an individual's source of emotional problems in a very short amount of time.

I'm going to have to ask for a citation for this one, fellas. I for one do not believe that you can do an effective psychological diagnosis of a stranger over the phone in a manner of minutes. It doesn't work that way. People who do that, they have a hammer and all they see are nails. For example, with Dr. Drew, everybody's an addict. With Dr. Phil, everybody has morality problems. They are both quacks who fake ability by diagnosing everyone with the same damn problem, and they both make the world a crappier place.

I don't know much about Viscott, but I am extremely skeptical that he had any magical ability to "isolate" the source of a stranger's problems. Maybe I am wrong -- but that's what we have the verifiability policy for. Show me a citation, and I'll shut up. Until then, this sentence can't stand.

I'm pretty confident I am right here, and the IP refuses to discuss it. I mostly just want to get some backup here, so I am not engaging in a bald edit war. (Although, since the IP refuses to talk, I think I have the moral high ground anyway, despite how the edit history may appear...) Anyway, comments are welcome. --Jaysweet (talk) 17:22, 1 October 2008 (UTC)


 * as it stands the sentence reads like a PR piece, not an encyclopedia. someone earlier on this page stated that coming to very rapid conclusions about the underlying causes of people's emotional problems was Viscott's "signature move" - that much could probably be stated in a non-promotional tone, with a "citation needed" tag until a source is provided. the "hard-hitting yet compassionate" part really isn't encyclopedic - whether one agrees with it or not - and in my opinion that part ought to be removed. Sssoul (talk) 13:53, 4 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I concur with your suggestion, and have revised the article as such. I don't have a big problem with leaving an uncited neutral statement as "citation needed", as long as it seems reasonable. To say that his style was to *attempt* to isolate the problems is just fine with me.
 * However, the IP address (who is almost certainly also User:DoTheRightThing refuses to discuss it, so I'm sure it will just get reverted again. I have reason to believe the IP has a strong conflict of interest in this matter, but I will refrain from identifying it for now as per WP:OUTING. --Jaysweet (talk) 16:31, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

WP policy requires citations for any statement that is disputed by anyone for any reason. Since the bulk of most WP articles are non-cite-able statements, this means that anyone who "doesn't believe" a statement can remove it if no citation is found. The problem with this is that "not believing" is just as much original research as the original statement. This simplistic challenge process is one of the few things wrong with WP, IMO. There will always be true statements that cannot be confirmed by third-party publication. Removing all of them would leave WP a barren place.

In the present case, I listened to many Viscott broadcasts as a teenager and I remember clearly how smoothly and quickly he was able to home in on the underlying causes of a caller's problems. Then he would suggest something practical the caller could do to fix the problems. While we had no way of knowing the ultimate results, it was clear that the callers were, if not entirely transformed by the advice, at least very grateful for it.

The fact that this was his program's style and structure deserves to be recorded in WP, even if you do not believe it possible and think he must have been a fraud (he was never accused of fraud in his lifetime), and even if no citation supporting or denying this structure can be found.

The fact that there are great (or seemingly great) people and ideas who happen to be ignored in the popular and scientific press should not be used as a weapon with which to attack them in WP. Traditional encyclopedias relied on the learning of its contributors. WP should similarly incorporate the direct knowledge of its editors, marking it as statements claimed as fact by those editors. (Note that this advice excludes opinion. Opinion should always be cited.) David Spector (talk) 01:09, 13 March 2011 (UTC)