mhendo:
Wow, i missed this little gem.
Firstly, what the hell is a “partial Ph.D.”? Either you have one or you don’t. I’m working towards a Ph.D. right now, but i don’t say that i have a “partial Ph.D.”
More importantly, you claim to have undertaken graduate study in sexual differentiation at an Ivy League school, and yet your arguments show a complete lack of sophistication about how such differentiation might be defined.
You still haven’t told us exactly what it is your test might measure. Sure, it would tell us whether the test subject looked at a man or a woman first, but to take such sketchy data and draw broad conclusions about sexuality is extremely difficult. You would have to make wild assumptions about the very thing you claim to be seeking: people’s reasons for (consciously or subconsciously) chosing to look at one sex over another.
Do you see what i’m saying? You say that you’re seeking to help people “believe that sexual orientiation is biological,” but the very test that you’ve devised to do this has no way of determining the causes behind a person’s predisposition to look at one gender or another. At best, it is simply a measure of subconscious reactions, with no basis for assessing whether those reactions are the result of biological, psychological, social, or cultural predispositions.
Your whole experiment rests on the notion of an objective, biological “baseline” of sexuality. But assuming this baseline in your experimental design is inconsistent with actually trying to determine whether such a baseline actually exists. It ends up as a circular argument. So, is this a study of differences in sexuality, or differences in sex, or differences in gender? You can’t begin a study seeking the innate, biological bases of homosexuality and then immediately make the assumption that men and women will manifest their homosexuality differently. This is something that needs to be studied and assessed, not simply assumed.
I admit that this is a complicated problem that no one has yet to master. Please tell me what is wrong with my experiment as a STARING point. And yes, I have an ABD (All but Dissertation) from a very good university. This isn’t about me. It is about whether this is a good starting point for further research and so far I gather that it is. I want your INTELLIGENT contributions, NOT ABOUT ME, but about how the experiment might work and how it might be refined, in WILLING SUBJECTS.