Talk:Alfred Kinsey/Archive 3

Not Atheist.
Alfred Kisne was not Atheist. He was Methodist but not very religious especially later in life. The Kinsey biography published a decade ago mentions this, and the article should be edited.100.34.143.131 (talk) 22:19, 18 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Would you be specific about which biography you mean and where in it this can be found? The statement "Kinsey was an atheist." is rather stark just sitting there by itself and could stand more context. Dhtwiki (talk) 01:54, 19 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi sorry I just saw this reply now. This is the biography: Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life: James H. Jones: 9780393327243. Unfortunately I read my copy and gave it to a friend but it mentions how he was not that religious, but not atheist.100.34.143.131 (talk) 00:57, 1 July 2018 (UTC)


 * Can you retrive your book? Without something to cite specifically (to page number), there's not much to do, especially since the current assertion seems sourced, although to an apparently undated Washington Times article. My own at-home biography is the Conrnelia Christenson book, which apparently goes into little detail about later religious feeling, apart from Kinsey's looking back "with clear distaste" at being used by his father as a "decoy" by his father to expose shopkeepers willing to sell cigarettes to a minor (page 17, and an element of the film). Dhtwiki (talk) 21:40, 1 July 2018 (UTC)

Sorry no I cannot retrieve the book as I gave it away after I was done reading it as a gift to a friend who lives in another far away region of my country, and I am not sure if he still has it?100.34.143.131 (talk) 01:28, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

Kinsey was not atheist at all and was Methodist but just not very open about his religion-especially later in life. Please correct this.100.14.40.216 (talk) 10:28, 5 September 2020 (UTC)


 * As I said before, you need to find a source for this. See Verifiability. Dhtwiki (talk) 21:22, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

In Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life nothing like atheist or atheism appears in the index. What does appear is this: In December 1915, he joined the First Congregational Church, or, as it was known at Bowdoin, “the church on the hill.”85 Whatever his motivation, Kinsey’s new religion was less rigid than Methodism. To be sure, Congregationalism required an intense act of conversion, but by the early twentieth century it had largely purged itself of fundamentalism’s emphasis on punishment to frighten people into self-denial and obedience. Perhaps Kinsey was drawn to Congregationalism because it represented a more tolerant, less anxious brand of Christianity; perhaps he was more confident of meeting its standards. Or perhaps he simply wanted to fit in. [...] By switching churches, Kinsey broke with his past and joined the company of men he needed to impress in order to succeed at Bowdoin.86

The present claim is that "Kinsey was also shown to be an atheist who loathed religion and its constraints on sex." 'Kinsey' critics ready, Cheryl Wetzstein, The Washington Times. Retrieved February 2, 2007. This simply ignores that as a liberal Christian he could equally loathe such constraints as well. So, loathing religious constraints on sex isn't evidence of being an atheist, it is equally plausible that he was a liberal Christian. To cut a long story short, I saw no evidence that Kinsey came out as an atheist. Wild guesses about that won't do. tgeorgescu (talk) 22:28, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Upon reconsideration, Jones writes that Kinsey became agnostic or atheist, though the documentary evidence is weak, i.e. Kinsey did not come out as atheist. At least he made no public statements to that extent, so his atheism or agnosticism is rather inferred by biographers than asserted by Kinsey himself.

It is also possible that as belief he remained a liberal Christian, and as knowledge about the existence of God he was agnostic. So, you see, there is no contradiction between being Christian and being agnostic. tgeorgescu (talk) 23:37, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

FBI file
I saw the FBI file about Alfred Kinsey and:


 * many things are not about Kinsey, but about the Institute he created;
 * many things concern a trial for importing obscene material against the Institute, a trial that the Institute has won;
 * moral-religious evaluations of Kinsey's work;
 * unconfirmed suspicions that Alfred Kinsey or his followers or donors were Soviet agents;
 * a letter from Hoover to Kinsey, which was misunderstood by a journalist.

Total: 0 (zero) offenses committed by Kinsey & co. Does anyone know WP:SECONDARY sources about this? Since if I state my own analysis of WP:PRIMARY sources it would be WP:OR. tgeorgescu (talk) 03:09, 11 March 2022 (UTC)

Sourcing
I'm distressed to see that an MSNBC article was cited here. Not even close to a reliable source. And it's called "Here are wildest arguments against marriage equality"? Wikipedia needs to do a lot better. Get some standards. 2601:142:200:38B0:25AC:3594:9BE8:5764 (talk) 00:36, 24 June 2022 (UTC)


 * See Reliable_sources/Noticeboard. Generally speaking, a source is not either all-out reliable or all-out unreliable, but reliable or not reliable for the claim being made. For further insight, search for MSNBC at WP:RSP.
 * To cut down the craps: do you claim that Reisman did not write that?
 * Solution: according to WP:RSN, I have also provided the WP:PRIMARY source for further WP:Verification.
 * I mean: I might not know everything, but I seek that my editing is open, transparent and thorough. Also, I define truth as what WP:CHOPSY say it's true. And my definition of truth is generally compliant with the understanding of the Wikipedia Community. And, believe me, the evidence standard for giving the lie to the unanimous view of CHOPSY is extremely high. tgeorgescu (talk) 03:36, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

Not representative of what he really was.
Kinsey was no better than Money. Both dont deserve any notoriety for the fraudulent studies they did. Why is normalizing such behavior so important now? Wikipedia is part of it now too. Sick fucks. 2603:8001:C03D:FC1F:F0A5:A9B7:F2D8:C628 (talk) 06:31, 12 June 2022 (UTC)


 * You missed the part with But, again, representativeness was not his main concern, he was mainly concerned with charting the variation. ... If his data were basically wrong, all scientists would have laughed at him. But they didn't. And While even the GOP recognizes that "I think even with Christians the gay [marriage] issue, that ship has sailed."
 * While the Republican Party is not fully acceptant of T, they made peace with LGB. tgeorgescu (talk) 10:48, 12 June 2022 (UTC)


 * The vitriol seems produced by this: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20256528/ . Although the link from Kinsey to the affirmation of transsexuals is rather tenuous.
 * I can agree that becoming transgender is not the magic solution to all their life problems, and even that some of them come to regret such change (mainly because other people are very mean to them, to the extent others cancel their ability to function properly in society). But I suspect that the movie is basically hate speech.
 * Here it is: What is a Woman?. The charge that Kinsey experimented upon five months old children is mythomania erotica. The film makers chose for the easy cop out of mythomania, so their credibility is close to worthless. The reality-based community has a very low opinion of such paranoid rants.
 * Christian means someone dedicated to Christ, defined as The Truth. People who indulge in pseudology are not Christian and are not conservative. tgeorgescu (talk) 10:52, 17 June 2022 (UTC)
 * How is the article not representative? X-Editor (talk) 01:15, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Meaning: not representative of conspiracy theories and of pseudologia fantastica. The article includes views from authors who don't like Kinsey, but there is of course a difference between not liking Kinsey and the lunatic fringe/lying like a dog. Do I put all my money upon Kinsey being right? No. But there are ways of attacking him which are utterly debasing for the attacker. When one cannot avoid behaving like a paranoid fool, they lose the debate by default, at least in so far it is attended by educated people. When the champions of one side are idiotic clowns, one naturally tends to favor the other side. The leaders of the conservatives have to get their facts straight, unless they want to leave the impression that conservatives are senile, comprehending neither science nor the world around them. This does not mean that Wikipedia is opposed to conservatives, but Wikipedians are allergic to stupidity. As Peter Enns stated, "I’m only talking here about uninformed public claims made by Evangelical leaders. They may be rhetorically effective, but they are false and only lead to more cognitive dissonance." Their insinuations are a mere parody of conservatism.
 * Why they did not ask the FBI for information? Because it was fairly obvious, even to these conspiracy theorists, that the FBI had nothing on Kinsey. Meaning no felony.
 * And this is simply scientific retardation: 1044-1045 "The State of Texas should repeal all Texas laws based on the fraudulent research by Dr. Alfred Kinsey."  He died 66 years ago. That means ages ago in respect to scientific research. Perhaps they should name a Texas law based solely upon research by Kinsey, and not upon the 2001-2022 consensus of the American Psychiatric Association. The POV of the Texas GOP is so otherworldly that it seems that they lived totally isolated from the medical science of the past 50 years. Any bona fide MD could have told them that.
 * "A specter is haunting the US—the specter of Alfred Kinsey. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies."
 * The difference: the US Communist Party were a bunch of losers, while Kinsey got endorsed as official science.
 * If politicians think they can decide all by themselves upon what amounts to "fraudulent research", they are in for a rude awakening: such privilege is reserved to the scientific community only. It requires an amazing degree of scientific illiteracy to figment that politicians would have such privilege. That's why I said they behave like clowns: their understanding of the ways wherein science works is abysmal. Yup, they are the same people who oppose vaccination and the teaching of evolution. The US Congress is scientifically advised by the National Academy of Sciences, but politicians have no option of overruling (i.e. changing) the scientific consensus when they no longer like it. Politicians do politics, scientists do science. The scientific community is self-policing in respect to scientific fraud.
 * According to the National Post, a conservative Canadian newspaper, Walsh used "bad-faith storytelling to rile up audiences while oversimplifying complex issues." So, this confirms my view that What is a Woman? employed pathological lies. Yeah, conservative journalists imply that Walsh is a manipulative liar (it is Zivo's article, but he is not publishing it alone). So, forget about liberals, this is a dispute between rationally-minded conservatives who show empathy for their fellow citizens, and conservatives who have no respect for science and no respect for truth. Walsh seems more like a rabble-rouser from Agora (film). tgeorgescu (talk) 09:51, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

FTN
Discussing it again at WP:FTN. tgeorgescu (talk) 20:44, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

As has shown, I was doing Reisman much too much honor to include her in the article about Kinsey. WP:ONEWAY applies, so paranoid rants about Kinsey being child abuser or fraud are banned from Wikipedia. tgeorgescu (talk) 01:50, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Prisons, etc.
It is true that Kinsey studied prisoners. But he did not study exclusively prisoners. And that the statistical representativeness of his data was questioned. But, again, representativeness was not his main concern, he was mainly concerned with charting the variation. Many post-Kinsey studies revealed that indeed a large majority of Americans indulged in illegal activities, according to the laws from Kinsey's time. So, okay, his data were then questionable, but subsequent surveys have shown that it were basically correct. Stating that universities all over the world followed in his footsteps because academics are members of a giant planetary Satanic conspiracy is sheer lunacy. If his data were basically wrong, all scientists would have laughed at him. But they didn't. And Wikipedia is heavily biased for mainstream science and for the medical orthodoxy.

Curious about his overestimation of nonheterosexuality? See https://relationshipsinamerica.com/pdf/Relationships%20in%20America%202014.pdf. This is from a conservative social research institute. If you crunch their numbers (page 18) you will find that about 20% of US women between 18 and 60 years old had at least occasionally lesbian experiences or attractions. More than half of these 20% had some lesbian sex.

As long as the alternative is a paranoid conspiracy theory, Wikipedia will continue to assert that Kinsey was basically right. Kinsey's estimates should not be judged according to what scientists knew in his own time, but according to what we now know to be accurate estimates of masturbators, nonheterosexuals, and so on. It is a sad day for conservatism when it has to be defended with spewing conspiracy theories. tgeorgescu (talk) 03:25, 3 June 2022 (UTC)

Please read the above. WP:FRINGE conspiracy theories are unwelcome to be written in the voice of Wikipedia.

I don't think that Reagan and Thatcher stood for a conservatism which rejects mainstream science.

I think you missed that in our article is sourced that Kinsey stands for "scientific orthodoxy". While his detractors stand for unsubstantiated allegations and paranoid conspiracy theories. Why we would ask the opinion of politicians upon a matter which can only be judged by mainstream scientists? That's a fallacious appeal to authority. The National Academy of Sciences is the scientific advisor of the US Congress, its advisor designated by law. American Legislative Exchange Council isn't its scientific advisor. ALEC is a deeply homophobic organization, so they have an axe to grind against Kinsey, whom they perceive as the liberator of homosexuals. For their history of defense of various pseudoscientific POVs, it is patently obvious that the ALEC is incompetent at recognizing mainstream science for what it is.

The edits of the IP aren't a mockery of Kinsey, but a mockery of the highbrow conservative.

Kinsey asked all sorts of people about their sexual experiences. It was his job to do it. I don't know why you single Kinsey out for asking a Nazi about his sexual experiences. The idea that scientists should not ask difficult questions is called obscurantism. Paul R. Gross: "Everybody who has undertaken in the last 300 years to stand against the growth of scientific knowledge has lost." Highbrow conservatives understand this very well. I'm not opposed to conservatism, I'm opposed to rednecks who bash mainstream science, belong to the False Rape Allegations Party and peddle conspiracy theories. In the end, making false pedophilia allegations about a person who died 65 years ago is a token of a feeble mind. Not that I'm diagnosing the anti-Kinsey movement with anything, just saying my own opinion. This whole pedophilia charade was invented by a feeble-minded woman who stated that all mainstream sexologists are "Nazi serial pedophiles" because they sided with Kinsey despite her rants. She even tried to make the US Congress pass a law de-funding scientists who stick to mainstream sexology. See, if you are a sexologist and you don't do research the feeble-minded way, she would de-fund you. Her agenda was dumbing down American science.

Morals: if you have no respect for mainstream science, we will boot you out of this website.

And for your information: according to the laws of the time, more than 50% of Americans would have been considered sex offenders if their sexual experiences were known to investigators. So, be careful with claims that he investigated sex offenders. "Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men and hang up them." Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth. At the end of the day, US are a democracy, and sex offenders according to the laws of that time are the majority and elect the politicians and politicians name SCOTUS judges. The majority is no longer oppressed by prudish moralists, that seems to be the problem according to ALEC. tgeorgescu (talk) 04:44, 4 June 2022 (UTC)

Percentage
The percentage according to the Austin Institute is being discussed at WP:NORN.

So, yup, is seems that either one fifth or about one quarter of US women had some lesbian/bisexual sex or attraction.

Kinsey was lambasted for the "ten percent myth" and it appears that about 23.9% of US women have had some involvement in lesbianism (sexual and/or romantic). And who says it? A conservative, right-wing institute from Texas. tgeorgescu (talk) 10:05, 4 June 2022 (UTC)
 * We don't add material on the basis of 'even these people admit it'. Actually, right-wing groups may be motivated to exaggerate prevalence for their own reasons, to whip up moral panic that homosexuality is a socially learned contagion. I don't see how this group's views are relevant to the topic of Kinsey except as part of a WP:SYNTH argument.
 * It in no way detracts from how groundbreaking his work was that the exact rates he found for certain behaviors were found to be too high by later researchers. He did not use random sampling. Up-to-date secondary sources that critically analyze his work agree on this. Science advances and past findings get refined. Crossroads -talk- 01:03, 5 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Mark Regnerus is not an amateur, he is a full professor of sociology at a reputable university. And the source does mention Kinsey, albeit passingly.
 * My take is that I don't believe that highbrow conservatives are idiots, or that they lie like a dog.
 * While I might not agree with Regnerus's personal views upon LGBT, I trust him to render the objective facts correctly.
 * Whether Regnerus likes Kinsey is besides the point, but Regnerus manifestly works in a tradition which began with Kinsey, the source discloses as much.
 * I'm not so filled with hatred and suspicion as to believe that conservatives are biased hacks who can't tell the truth.
 * Perhaps it helps to think that Regnerus's view was the normative mainstream view just a decade ago. tgeorgescu (talk) 15:40, 5 June 2022 (UTC)
 * As I said at ORN:
 * "It's still a report from a politically biased institute, as your own source acknowledges, rather than a published paper in a journal. That source and the sources in our article on Mark Regnerus also show how controversial his work has been. That source also only mentions Kinsey as the originator of what is usually called the Kinsey Scale, which is not enough to mitigate the SYNTH issues here."
 * I would be saying the same thing for a left-biased institute or researcher. Whether such a view was common in society is not relevant, just representing the published reliable sources with proper weight. Crossroads -talk- 00:30, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
 * You may say that it is not germane to this article, but the percentage of 23.9% is not itself WP:SYNTH.
 * Regnerus has been portrayed as having ill will, while in fact it could be a disagreement about arcane statistical matters. I.e. homosexual parents being better/worse if one controls for social class and income. If homosexuals are richer than average, that would go against them, if they are poorer than average, that would plead in their favor. And you have bickering among sociologists if it has to be mean, median, or mode.
 * Seen the criterion of embarrassment, its bias is a feature, not a bug. And I did not hide its bias, but stated it upfront. tgeorgescu (talk) 06:49, 6 June 2022 (UTC)
 * The source still doesn't connect it to Kinsey. I'm not sure what the "criterion of embarrassment" is supposed to mean. Right-wing-biased people could be argued to favor low figures (to minimize the size of this minority as unimportant) or high figures (to portray it as a rampant social contagion). This is why it's best to avoid such sources entirely as undue. Crossroads -talk- 02:26, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

Have you seen this? https://yougov.co.uk/topics/relationships/trackers/how-brits-describe-their-sexuality?crossBreak=1824 tgeorgescu (talk) 08:28, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, but it varies heavily by age, different surveys can get inconsistent results, and there are various reasons that their survey responses can be at odds with their actual history of behavior or physiological responses. Let's stick to the academic review articles. Crossroads -talk- 05:38, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

Epistemology
This whole enterprise of attacking the scientific consensus from 60 years ago is unwholesome. Judith Reisman apparently never heard of Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend because it is an intellectual cop out to resort to conspiracy theories instead of reading their works.

As if the scientific consensus from 60 years ago would have anything to do with the consensus statements of the American Psychiatric Association from 2022. Wholly deplorable! ALEC is completely deplorable for seeking to change the APA consensus from 2022 by attacking someone who died in 1956. That is sheer academic incompetence. For more information: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/12/11/1044266/- I know it isn't considered WP:RS, but it gives copious quotes from ALEC statements.

"I envision a bunch of old geezers sitting around the table talking about the “old days” and then they use that conversation to write articles and “model legislation”. Every time – it becomes more evident to me that these folks will grab onto any piece of outdated crap and use it to forward their agenda. Every time – even though ALEC members aren’t all old geezers – they act as if they have been stunted in growth mentally and can not relate to the society as it exists today. I truly believe that ALEC wants to take us back to the good old days of the robber barons."

- MNDem999

Anyway, you get the idea: by the time of the 2004 ALEC paper, ALEC members were scientifically several decades behind the consensus of mainstream psychiatry; they were truly left behind. Psychiatry has advanced a lot since Kinsey died, but that was not despite his scholarship. ALEC statements upon what amount to junk science in contemporary psychiatry should be allotted the same due weight as Kent Hovind's opinions upon what amounts to junk science in contemporary biology. And, frankly, I don't think that ALEC really cares of what Kinsey did, they're just seeking for a club (stick or bat) in order to bully American psychiatrists into submission to Old Testament law. Of course ALEC claims that Kinsey did "junk science", but what they mean is browbeating the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Medical Association into turning back the clock with 70 years. ALEC couch their move in moral and humanitarian terms, but what they really do is propaganda against freedom and against civil rights. While even the GOP recognizes that "I think even with Christians the gay [marriage] issue, that ship has sailed." . So, if Kinsey's legacy means freedom for homosexuals, neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to undo Kinsey's legacy. As for Kinsey being the father of contraception and abortion, that is not a remotely plausible claim. Accusing him of having created either seems like the ramblings of an opium smoker.

Besides, the dailykos article offers quotes from the ALEC website, wherein ALEC seems to make propaganda for Christian Sharia law. RSVPAmerica intends to make it possible, for those whose heart is tender, to restore God’s law and make it honorable again (Isaiah 42) in America, to find the Truth about this matter could be construed as propaganda for theocracy&mdash;if this isn't really the case, then the author is in bad need of intelligible writing classes.

You cannot change the medical consensus from 2022 by claiming that a certain scientific outlook originated from Kinsey, same as you cannot change it by claiming that it originated from Napoleon Bonaparte. It's an ad hominem (patent token of intellectual ineptitude) to say that a scientific outlook is invalid because it originated from Kinsey; you should debate instead if it is supported by evidence published with peer-review in reputable scientific journals. Yup, it amounts to formal proof of ineptitude, any peer reviewers will PLONK you from any respectable journal for doing it. Nobody stops you from believing that such ad hominem is a valid argument, but you should never state that publicly among educated people. They know very well that it cuts no ice, and that listening to it is a waste of time. E.g. some of the current statistical tests used in sociology come from racist scientists who used those tests in order to promote racism. But that does not mean that the tests themselves are flawed.

About Only interviewed prisoners convicted of child sex crimes. And performed sexual experiments on children as young as 10 months old. I will spare you the details from modern epistemology, but it was already clear for centuries that knowledge means true belief based upon evidence. So, performed sexual experiments on children as young as 10 months old isn't knowledge because there is no evidence in that respect. Never was and never will be. Just take a look at Talk:Alfred Kinsey/Archive 3: the feds were already examining his life, since McCarthy was a powerful politician pushing them do it. But they found nothing on Kinsey. Why trust a paranoid woman and distrust the FBI? What could she know that the FBI did not know? She read the same book as the feds, and she came to wholly different conclusions. These are simply paranoid rants about what Kinsey could have done according to her own imagination. Yup, Kinsey got witch-hunted by McCarthy, even if the link between Kinsey and the Communist Party was purely imaginary. As Judith Levine stated, the sexual morality of the Communist Party was pretty much on the same page as that of the Catholic Church: the Communists were prudes, so the sexual revolution certainly wasn't a Communist plot. While there were some experiments with a sexual revolution in Leninist Soviet Union, they were quenched before Stalin got to power.

And you should not believe everything the BBC tells you. I saw The Power of Nightmares and while the movie is beautiful, the evidence behind it is very shallow. It is simply an opinion piece, it does not render factual knowledge (although it may contain widely agreed facts). I mean its grand narrative is bogus. It's a bunch of tall stories about the neocons. It's from the BBC. Maybe it is commendable as courageous journalism, but essentially it is not based upon evidence. Not that you can't learn anything from it, but it is just a highfalutin conspiracy theory, catering at liberals and pinkos. Why wasn't Adam Curtis killed by neocons? Or sent to jail? Or at least fired? Because there is no such conspiracy.

Drawing the line: such allegations about Kinsey are taken seriously only by wackos, ignoramuses, and political hucksters. It is as credible as I would tell you that J.F. Kennedy and F.D. Roosevelt drank children's blood for dinner. Whatever she achieved through rhetoric, charisma, and imagination falls down like a house of cards because she had no evidence. That's why she never had much success at persuading scientists. They ask creepy questions like what's the evidence for it? And like how does she know what she pretends to know?

And for people who do not like my edits, anyone can fill a complaint against me at WP:AE. Please read WP:GOODBIAS before doing so. tgeorgescu (talk) 00:26, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

About his abusive experimentation on children and infants has been widely condemned: there no evidence that he has ever experimented on children, and there is no evidence that, supposing it really happened, it was widely condemned. If it were widely condemned, WP:RS were very easy to find, but according to my Google searches such allegations are restricted to conspiracist and alt-right websites. Such allegations have never been published in mainstream scientific/scholarly journals because these allegations are a paranoid conspiracy theory. These are simply an attack by lunatic charlatans upon the findings of mainstream science. For the paranoid mind the fact that these allegations do not appear in WP:RS is considered "evidence" of a worldwide conspiracy. tgeorgescu (talk) 20:30, 11 June 2022 (UTC)