In reply to Deirdre McCloskey’s second letter, I wrote:

Dear Professor McCloskey,

I’m glad to hear more of your side of the story. To answer your questions:

“In what way have I or anyone else in this debate abridged anyone’s free speech?” By attacking someone — Bailey — who said something you didn’t like. Fearful of future attacks from you or Conway or Andrea James, others will keep their mouths shut. The term is chilling effect. Here is Wikipedia’s definition: “A chilling effect is a situation where speech or conduct is suppressed or limited by fear of penalization at the hands of an individual or group.” Wikipedia’s example is fear of a lawsuit — which you have threatened (” I’m going to sue Bailey for defamation if . . . “). Minutes after I posted my second blog entry about the attacks on Bailey, the first post that mentioned you, I got an email from a wise friend. “There has been a big McCloskey/Bailey feud, I believe involving also lawsuits or the threat thereof,” he wrote. It was a warning. He was worried.

“In what does our great power lie?” In four things: 1. Job security. Not only tenure — you and Conway are near the top of your professions. 2. Money. 3. Respect. Your upcoming honorary degree, for example. A recent memoir by an esteemed economist praised you for your “courage.” Conway’s membership in the National Academy of Engineering. 4. Knowing how the system works — in particular how to get powerful bureaucracies (such as Northwestern’s) to do what you want. “We are a couple of professors not in sexology.” Please. You and Conway are not average professors. What fraction of professors get honorary degrees? What fraction of engineering professors are in the National Academy of Engineering?

“What about our right to free speech?” You think calling your absurd complaints to credulous and powerful authorities “free speech” somehow defends them? I don’t.

“What about our lives? . . . My children have not spoken to me since I transitioned, in 1995. I have two grandchildren I have not been allowed to meet.” Yes, that is horrible. No one should be treated like that. But the fact that you have been treated badly doesn’t justify doing something awful (your absurd complaints) to someone else.

How would I react if your scenario about psychologists came to pass? I would do nothing. I’m supposed to get upset that Person X asked Person Y for a letter and before Person Y wrote that letter he asked Person X to speak to him — perhaps about the contents of the letter? On what planet is that wrong? I should react because someone “had sex with a psychologist”? I should be upset that the person “used the “evidence” thus acquired to support his unscientific theories in a long book”? We are at a curious place in intellectual history when a Distinguished Professor of this and that, soon to receive an honorary degree from a major university, thinks that a sane person might be upset that someone had sex with a psychologist.

Your complaints to powerful and credulous authorities, you say, were not absurd because they were taken seriously. (”They took what you call an “absurd” complaint most seriously.”) Okay, here is why your complaints were absurd. 1. You and Conway complained to the State of Illinois that Bailey was practicing psychology without a license because he wrote letters on behalf of several persons who had come to him for help. He helped them! They came to him for help! To complain about this is absurd. To say your complaint “protects” anyone is absurd. To say what Bailey did resembles “mugging” is absurd. No one seeks out a mugger and asks to be mugged. 2. You and Conway orchestrated the filing of human-subjects complaints against Bailey. These complaints assumed that persons mentioned in stories in Bailey’s book were “research subjects” — simply because they were in the book. Never before in the history of science had the subject of a story told to illustrate a point been thereby considered a research subject. Bailey’s book is not a scientific monograph. It is not a piece of science. It is a trade book about science. When I or anyone else gives a lecture about a scientific subject, and tell a story from everyday life to make the conclusions come alive, do we need informed consent from everyone mentioned in the story? Of course not. No one has ever been required to do this. No one has ever done this. No one has ever even conceived of such a thing. The whole idea is absurd. Northwestern administrators may be credulous; I’m not.

Twice in your letter you combine two very different activities as if they are similar. “My criticism and complaint” is one example; “criticizing people in open forums and through channels” is the other. These two activities of yours were very different. Open-forum criticism, if factually correct, is fine with me. Absurd complaints to credulous authorities with the power to destroy someone’s career are much much less than fine with me. When Dreger says you tried to “ruin” Bailey, she is referring to the absurd complaints. Not to the review in Reason.

Sincerely,

Seth Roberts

Yesterday, to my surprise, I received an email from Deirdre McCloskey, whom I had criticized. Here it is:

Dear Professor Roberts:

I imagine you are not longer open to persuasion on the Bailey/Dreger issue, having written yourself on it in no uncertain terms after reading Dr. Dreger’s article and especially Mr. Carey’s piece in the Times. People are like that, I know. They swallow a line hastily acquired—in this case the Bailey = Galileo, “transsexual activists” (e.g. Barres, Roughgarden, McCloskey, Conway, and other distinguished scientists) = The Inquisition—and then won’t listen any more. It’s one of the main supports for the culture of yelling we seem to have developed in the United States over the past couple of decades.

But in case you are more careful and thoughtful than your blog suggests, I attach a couple of attempts to persuade you that you’ve got the story wrong. Dreger is wrong, and what’s more important in the long run a theory based on ignoring most of the scientific evidence, and appealing instead to the sort of prejudices about queers you praise in your piece, is wrong.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey

Attached to the email were copies of her Reason review of Bailey’s book, a commentary by her on Dreger’s article, and her vita.

I replied:

Dear Professor McCloskey:

Thank you for writing. I am happy to have complaints about my writing but it would help if you were more specific. What in my blog wasn’t “careful and thoughtful”? When you say I wasn’t careful you seem to be saying there are factual mistakes in what I wrote. If so, please tell me; I would like to correct them.

In your letter, you seem to say I have “swallow[ed] a line hastily acquired.” This is puzzling, since in my blog I mention writing to you about Bailey’s book draft many years ago. Surely thinking about something for many years isn’t hasty. One of your attachments is the review you wrote for Reason. Another puzzle because I quote from this review in my blog.

In your article about Dreger’s paper, you “deny that [you] worked ‘to ruin Bailey professional and personally” but this denial is incomplete and unconvincing. It’s incomplete because you don’t defend the letter you wrote to the State of Illinois complaining that Bailey had practiced medicine without a license. That is exactly trying to ruin someone.

And you don’t convince me that causing to be filed an absurd human-subjects complaint against Bailey constitutes some sort of virtuous act. “Complaining through channels about mistreatment of his victims”! Please. It is another example of trying to ruin someone.

In your email to me, you write:

what’s more important in the long run a theory based on ignoring most of the scientific evidence, and appealing instead to the sort of prejudices about queers you praise in your piece, is wrong.

This may be the big issue to you; it isn’t the big issue to me. The big issue for me is free speech. Two professors (you and Conway) with great power tried to silence someone who said something they didn’t like. I titled my blog posts on the topic “Can Professors Say the Truth?” The “truth” was not Blanchard’s theory; it was that Blanchard had proposed a theory, a theory that Bailey accurately described. Blanchard said something; Bailey accurately reported what he said. The accurate reporting was the “truth”. Somehow it was not enough for you and Conway that Blanchard’s theory, if false, would eventually be discarded. Somehow it was not enough to attack the theory; you had to attack Bailey too, and in an awful way — by filing absurd complaints with credulous and powerful bureaucracies.

Sincerely,

Seth Roberts

Today she replied to my reply.

The Whole Foods – Wild Oats merger can finally take place, I was pleased to learn. A court denied the Federal Trade Commission’s request for a stay. The world needs more CEO’s like Whole Foods CEO John Mackey. In a talk he gave at Berkeley last year, he quoted Michaelangelo: “Criticize by creating,” a wise and memorable saying that I hadn’t heard before. That’s exactly what Mackey has done.

Part of today’s KQED Forum program with Michael Krasny was devoted to the attacks on Michael Bailey and his book. Here is the webpage. Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, was one of the guests. After Bailey gave a talk at Stanford in 2003, Roughgarden wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper that contained the following sentence:

To many observers, Bailey appears to be a rather dumb, stubborn, dense and possibly deceptive regular guy with some experience in locker-room humor.

This sort of comment would go over poorly on KQED, so what would she say? It turns out that she calls Bailey’s book a “fraud.” It is fradulent because it is not “science” — by which she means a scientific article — in spite of having the word science in the title. Apparently Roughgarden thinks that if you write a book about science it is fraud to use the word science in the title. She also complains that Bailey uses stories based on transsexuals he had met to illustrate Blanchard’s theory. She calls those stories Bailey’s evidence for the theory, ignoring the evidence in Blanchard’s papers. This is not quite the incisive criticism we might expect from a Stanford professor.