Talk:Samuel Soal

This started off like an authoritative and objective article -- then the rubbishers came in, citing themselves more for kicks than education - making Wikipedia out as hare-brained as themselves. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 120.21.1.138 (talk) 14:58, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Continued vandalism/POV edits by possible banned editor


All of the above IPs have been either vandalizing this article since 2013 by inserting offensive or rude comments or in the edit summary and/or inserting the same sort of fringe POV comments, attacking skeptics and claiming Soal's discredited research on ESP has been validated. All IPs trace to the same geographical location so it is clearly the same person.

On one of the above IPS, he gives away the game here by claiming he created the article himself. If we check the very first edits on this article:


 * a banned editor shows the same behavior as the above IPs (personal attacks and inserting pseudoscientific claims about parapsychology). The article is currently locked but as this user has been vandalizing the article for the last three years or more (on and off), I doubt he/she will stop if asked. But I will try anyway. I ask them here to please make their case to why they are inserting fringe sources into the article and randomly attacking editors in their edit summeries. A little angry (talk) 19:48, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Good examples of loose skeptical reasoning here in "A little angry's" management of this article. For example, to back up this retired journalist's effort to make himself total arbiter of all edits on this article, he reasons that because the same region is implicated in various IP addresses, all the edits must come from one person. Actually, it would be more rational to conclude that several IPs indicate several people, and to keep in mind (as millions of online businesses routinely do) that even a single IP address does not reliably refer to a single person. The journo pushes this strange argument seemingly so that he can back up another strange assumption of his: in order to agree with him that all recent edits should be rejected as unreliable, he reasons that we just need to accept one statement among them as reliable, i.e., that one editor among them claimed to have created the article. "A little angry" chooses to accept this statement as true, and obliges us to do the same, because then - given that that person was banned from further editing (by people no doubt of the same intellectual bent as "A little angry") - all other statements by the same person can be deemed to be unreliable! (Yep, you'll have to read that again if you want to get onto the article manager's wayward train-of-thought.) (If you also follow the link the latter gives to bolster this claim, it seems clear by the verbal skill and tone that the author of that point could not have created the article, which reads erudite enough and is largely now as it was, though with lingering and added errors, and partisan pushes.) The ultimate objective of all of this crooked thinking is seemingly for the manager to feel he can take responsibility himself for this article without obliging himself to discuss the reliability of any edits by others before he bans them. And why do this? - Presumably because this fellow has no substantive knowledge about the actual topic. We even see him restoring information that is clearly false - from the first to the final paragraph (eg - the Couttie bits are wrong all over; the claim was made by an earlier researcher, and don't even go to Soal's own claim for the "Gordon Davis Case"). How weird, contorted, disturbed and dysfunctional partisan skeptics expose their thinking to be when, failing to read up on the facts, they presume to conduct and report "research" of their own, research that's pre-designed to back up their merely rhetorical assumptions. While sullying the name of skepticism, we can at least thank "A Little Angry" for providing such classic examples, one after the other, of pseudo-scientific thought and practice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1.40.27.52 (talk) 22:06, 19 October 2015 (UTC)


 * You pretend you are a different person but all your IPS trace to the same geographical location in Australia and your insults and trolling style are exactly the same. A little angry (talk) 19:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)