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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
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11/22/04
Kinsey, A Movie Review by Victor Niederhoffer
The movie Kinsey is the story of a mad scientist without knowledge or
appreciation of the subject he is studying pursued by demons. It is reminiscent
of the passionate quest of the magicians that populate our own field. The
errors that the doctor makes when extending his methods of classifying gull wasps
to human sex acts are instructive to counter the earthquake scientists and end
of world people and spiritualists that populate our own field. The movie uses
the interview method that Kinsey used to gather subjects for his 1940's books
Sexual Behavior of the Human Male and Female to illuminate his own life. We saw
his father classifying his son's own sins, his own attempts to classify humans
like wasps, and his attempts to create a moral atmosphere among his assistants
that paralleled his own views concerning morality.
Liam Neeson plays a perfect mad
scientist who we've all seen so often in our classes teaching a class that he
has no knowledge of aside from the descriptive nomenclature and specialized
techniques that he applies to them. What's particularly reprehensible here is
that the movie tries to make it seem like the world is crazy and the scientist
is the hero as he applies one faulty technique after another. All of Kinsey's
work is useless because he used quota sampling. He sampled people haphazardly
from prisons and mental institutions and bars. He then encouraged the subjects to
find him other volunteers. The questions he asked were all content based,
designed to further his view that any form of sex was normal for the human
animal and that the emotions of love, romance, and the reflections on longer
term consequences had no content. The interviewers were part of a sordid web of
biased and underpaid researchers passionately hoping to elicit and participate
in the conclusions of the study. Like the polls of today that are conducted in
the main by those who wish the government to do something whatever the cost or
effect on incentives, the interviewers directly or indirectly intimidated their
subjects into giving the answers they desired showing prevalence of deviant
behavior.
The best passages to me relate to the dinner with Huntington Hartford,
a man I played Paradise Tennis with who was even more libertine than Dr. Kinsey
but who was unsettled by Kinsey's passionate departure from real life concerns
and problems. So many of the researchers in the field of investments approach
their subject without a grounding in economics or statistics that you can learn
much from the biases and oversights in the Kinsey report and the statistical
studies of Mosteller and Tukey and Wallis and the layman's catalogue of errors
in
The Kinsey Report : Modeling a Frankenstein Man.