Seth’s blog

Before I could reply to her third letter, Deirdre McCloskey wrote again:

Dear Professor Roberts:

Having looked into it a bit I am very intrigued by your diet, and will buy the book and try it out.

You have a lot of nerve, however, to quote Bohr— “The common aim of all science” is “the gradual removal of prejudices”—and then without self-experimentation, without consulting people like me who have self-experimented, without examining any of the literature except the sort you like, to relay to the world your prejudices about gender crossers. A lot of nerve.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey

I replied:

Dear Professor McCloskey,

I’m intrigued. What self-experimentation should I have done? [Later I realized she meant dress as a woman.]

Thank you for reading my book. Yes, Bohr’s quote is relevant. Science does remove prejudices. Including the science in Bailey’s book, I believe. I think Bailey’s book will be a powerful force for tolerance, you think the opposite. Let history decide.

I am not anti-gender-crosser. Nor is Bailey — but I wasn’t appalled by what you and Conway did to him because I liked his book. I have defended Holocaust deniers and praised a book with a generous view of creationism. I don’t deny the Holocaust and I’m not religious. I believe everyone deserves to speak, to be heard. Everyone. Without harassment or punishment.

Sincerely,

Seth Roberts

What a nice title, I thought, when I read in Marginal Revolution about a collection of essays called Do Economists Make Markets?. A few glances later I realized I had misread it. The title was not Do Economists Make Mistakes?

Do psychologists make mistakes?

No joke. Prozac in the water may be endangering the mussel population, now in serious decline. For more on such side effects of antidepressants, see Toxipedia.

My self-experimentation led me to believe that morning faces = Nature’s antidepressant. Morning faces = mussel-safe.

Deirdre McCloskey wrote again.

Dear Professor Roberts:

Criticizing someone is “abridging free speech”? Good Lord, how do you think the Constitutional Convention went? Have you listened to a political campaign? Have you participated in any scientific dispute? I guess not.

If Bailey is chilled, perhaps he should get out of the cold room. If one doesn’t like the heat of real scientific disagreement, get out of the kitchen. Free speech is how science advances. It ain’t beanbag.

You want to think of yourself as defending the weak. It’s a silly thought, which you have adopted completely uncritically from Mr. Carey’s journalism. You’ve in fact allied yourself to the most powerful and queer-hating forces in the society. Congratulations.

The “great power” is on the other foot. Relative to the Hispanic women he abused, Bailey had the power. Relative to Lynn and me (you never mention the other distinguished scientists involved, incidentally) in sexology, Ken Zucker has the power (which he has duly exercised, and which again you do not mention: perhaps it has not registered that he allocated 52 pages of his journal on sexual behavior to what the author described as history of science. Would you be the slightest bit suspicious if an editor in your field used his journal, unrefereed, in this way to defend his own views? Relative to Sex Scientists like Bailey and Zucker, and the reactionary and queer-hating people that Bailey, and now you, have inspirited (look at the blogs, dear), Lynn and I, as notable queers, do not have the power. Relative to the authority of The New York Times and it’s “Science” worshiping and queer-hating editors (though Carey himself, I think, is gay, which of course doesn’t mean he’s not queer hating!), the “power” of our articles is merely, as I said, a feeble one. The feeble power of truth against prejudice and ignorance and cowardice.

You simply won’t listen to the claims of the other side. You won’t read. You won’t consider. Nothing you say can be mistaken. Dreger got her facts exacly right. I have to conclude that you are immovable and uncritical. Bad qualities in a scientist, though in truth not all that rare in science and scholarship as they actually are.

I recommend that you get out more. Listen to a philosopher and anthropologist, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, who wrote a long time ago that what matters in science and scholarship is

our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presuppositions [in your case: sex, sex, sex is a true theory of queers; no Hispanic queer tells the truth; ordinary scientific disagreement abridges free speech], changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and no beause they have listened, really listened, to their friends’ [and enemies’] questions and objections
Rorty, “Experiments in Philsophical Genre,” Critical Inquiry 9 (March, 1983); 545-565, p. 562.

Words to live by. You’ve given no evidence that you have listened, really listened, to anyone except the tiny group of sex, sex, sex folk, believing uncritically their recently constructed image of Bailey as Galileo. You’ve not done the homework, and apparently have no shame that you haven’t.

Have I got you pegged right: Get a theory, any old theory, of gender crossing or of the Bailey Controversy, and stick with it, regardless of the evidence or logic, eh? Don’t open your mind. Don’t read. Don’t listen, really listen. I know a lot of economists like this, intellectually closed; my sister tells me they are pretty common in psychology, too.

Jean-Sartre wrote in 1944 (Anti-Semite and Jew: it’s the only book of his I have fully understood, and one the few of his writings I agree with) about a personality type:

there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed,would change take them? . . . . What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation(Sartre 1944, p. 18).

Until you’ve read, really read, my autobiography, say, or done other serious homework, listening, really listening, you’re not going to find the truth. You’re going to be stuck with your first impressions and your apparently very deep prejudices. I say again (I expect it will have no more effect than it has had before): shame on you for the socially bad and scientifically indefensible thing you have done.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey

Before I replied, McCloskey wrote again. I will post that letter tomorrow.

Her first letter and my reply. Her second letter and my reply

J. S. Haldane (1860-1936) was an English physiologist. (The better-known J. B. S. Haldane, a geneticist, is his son.)

He believed that there was no better experimental subject than the scientist himself. . . . Routinely, the accounts of his experiments involve vomiting, convulsions, trembling, confusion and sometimes memory loss. At one point, experimenting with extremes of low barometric pressure, and after writing ‘very wobbly’ as a self-assessment on a piece of paper, he stared into a hand-mirror to check himself for the blue lips — cyanosis — that would indicate anoxaemia. He did this for a long time. Turned out he was looking at the back rather than the front of the mirror. . . .

When the Germans started experimenting with gas warfare — chlorine at first, and later mustard gas — Haldane led the race to provide effective protection for the troops. (As ever, this involved gassing himself half to death.) . . . Having heard about the gas attacks, Churchill declared blithely: ‘Oh, what you want is what we have in the navy. Smoke helmets or smoke pads, and you make them out of cotton wool or something. You’d better get the Daily Mail to organize the making of a million of them.’

Haldane pointed out that while a pad of cotton wool clamped to the mouth might help a little with smoke inhalation, it wouldn’t offer the slightest protection against chlorine gas. Yet not long afterwards Haldane returned from France to discover the Times reporting that the War Office had appealed for donations of home-made gas-masks from cotton wool or ‘double stockinette’. Haldane, furious, was reassured that this was merely a propaganda exercise, and that the useless masks wouldn’t be dispatched to the Front. Yet, again, not long afterwards 90,000 of them found their way to France — and proved just as much help as Haldane predicted.

Meanwhile, Haldane and his team worked like mad at designing effective respirators, tearing up stockings and shawls and even the young Aldous Huxley’s scarf to make face-masks. The one they came up with went into mass production — but not before Haldane had to point out that the reason the women in the factory were getting their fingers burnt and their rubber gloves dissolved was that they were using caustic soda rather than, as prescribed, carbonate of soda.

From a review of a new biography of Haldane. Another review by Lynn Truss. Biographer’s blog. A third review.

Thanks to Dave Lull.