Quo’s ignorance and his errors are apparently my fault. How embarrassing for me. How irresponsible of me.

I know you may be tempted to want to apply a salve to my seared conscience, on the absurd grounds that Quo is wholly responsible for his own education, but humour me — what sort of punishment do you think I deserve?

When you have a legitimate point, it helps to express it in a polite and easily understandable way.

Links to other websites are difficult to spot when they are burried within the text of a comment; I therefore didn’t see your link to the Kinsey Institute’s site until now.

I don’t believe, and didn’t suggest that, “the past 50 years of study by thousands of researchers — and the lives of millions of gay men and women — all relies on something Bell & Weinberg wrote”. (Their study is 29 years old now, by the way, not 50 years old).

Perfect example: even after I gave him the direct link to the B&W codebook, do you think he bothered to look at it? No — he simply maintains that separate figures for behaviour and feelings are unavailable. “Baseless”, he says.

Yet, there they are. Neatly coded as response 20/49 and 20/50, both on a scale of 0 to 6, from the original 1969 survey. For a modest fee the Kinsey Institute would be more than happy to run either of them off, matched to any of the other 526 questions, ready for a stats package of choice.

Sadly, the fevered mind of Quo has locked on a false belief that the past 50 years of study by thousands of researchers — and the lives of millions of gay men and women — all relies on something Bell & Weinberg wrote.

Yes, irrational to the core.

If I missed that point (which means that the prostitute example I was using doesn’t work), it’s because the sheer idiocy of Bell et al’s approach is difficult to grasp fully. I was simply being too generous to them. I will be rewiting my critique of them accordingly.

Priya,

No, none of my arguments were irrational. I misread Bell et al on one point, failing to realize that they classified mainly heterosexual people as homosexual (it does seem hard to believe…), but that’s all.

You wrote that, “If you want the Bell and Weinberg data you can flipping well pay the Kinsey Institute to run it off for you. Following standard scientific research practice, the data set has been available (and in use) for 30 years.”

If by “the data set”, you mean their figures for their subjects’ separate Kinsey ratings for feelings and behavior (as distinct from the nonsense figures produced by averaging them), that seems totally baseless.

Tommy,

I see that, despite Grantdale’s attempt to help you, you honestly don’t understand my argument, which is quite simple and straightforward. That’s really too bad.

And I didn’t say it was “objective,” I said it was “more objective.” Or, I said within the context of the study their standards were objective. There’s less fuzziness there. Of course you at no point show it is an “absurd misuse of mathematics.” The mistake you made shows you clearly have no understanding of even the most simplistic mathematics. And as far as “rigid” that hilariously telling. “Rigid” means it can be proven or disproven, Quo, something you are terrified of. “Rigid” means coming up with standards BEFORE the experiment, not retroactively applying them in order to make the data fit as you believe should be done. “Rigid” means objective standards of the kind you keep avoiding stating with regards to “distant fathers” and “sensitive.”

Scientifically everything you believe is utter nonsense. Scientifically all your complaints are utter nonsense. So, go address the lack of objective standards in your hilariously stupid belief about “distant fathers” and “sensitive.” But we all know you won’t, you are terrified of objective standards. If you create objective standards, well then you might accidentally falsify them, your greatest fear.

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