Seth Roberts

I had a long correspondence with Deirdre McCloskey about what she and Lynn Conway did to try to ruin Michael Bailey. Most of it is on her website. The most interesting part was at the end. She wrote:Dear Professor Roberts: Anyone who is chilled by being challenged intellectually, I suppose you agree, doesn't belong in intellectual life.

Joan Roughgarden has responded to my comment about her recent KQED radio appearance. Her response includes this: Today, in 2007 only a few, like Roberts, still take Bailey’s work seriously. In 2006, Bailey’s work was featured on 60 Minutes in a piece titled “The Science of Sexual Orientation.” After the piece aired, a blogger criticized Bailey. Shari Finkelstein,the producer, responded:

Two days ago, the KQED radio program Forum with Michael Krasny discussed the attacks on Northwestern psychology professor Michael Bailey and his book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Here is their 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:

I did this experiment yesterday. It took the whole day but the results were clear by noon.At about 7 am I took 4 tablespoons of flaxseed oil (Spectrum Organic). I measured my mental function with a letter-counting test. Here is what happened.

Few people have used the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet more successfully than Tim Beneke, an Oakland journalist. I put before and after photos of him — before and after he lost about 100 pounds — on the front page of the proposal for The Shangri-La Diet. He writes:

Kaiping Peng, a friend of mine who is a professor at Berkeley, recently said to me that professors have an unusual place in our society: They are expected to tell the truth. Hardly anyone else is, he said. But what happens when they do? The most impressive professorial truth-telling in my lifetime has been The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism (2003) by Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern. It’s mainly about male homosexuals but it also discusses male-to-female transsexuals, not all of whom are homosexual.

Quinn Norton, a San Francisco journalist, had a tiny magnet implanted in her finger, which enabled her to detect electrical fields. Bits of my laptop became familiar as tingles and buzzes. Every so often I would pass near something and get an unexpected vibration. Live phone pairs on the sides of houses sometimes startled me. You might think of self-experimentation as a modern version of “know thyself” but this is “know the rest of the world”.

Lesson 1. Doing something is better than doing nothing. "You should go to the studio everyday," a University of Michigan art professor named Richard Sears told his students. "There's no guarantee that you'll make something good -- but if you don't go, you're guaranteed to make nothing." The same is true of science. Every research plan has flaws, often big, obvious ones -- but if you don't do anything, you won't learn anything.

Spy magazine had a wonderful column by Ellis Weiner called “How to Be a Grown-up”. (In one column, Weiner pointed out that homeless, applied to beggars, should be houseless.) Gordy Slack, a Bay Area science writer, has written the first book that might be called How to be a Grown-up About Evolution. It is an account of the Dover, PA trial in which parents sued the school board for requiring that intelligent design be mentioned in biology class.

From the Shangri-La Diet forums: I stumbled on SLD when I, after a sinus-infection, lost my ability to smell and therefore also taste the flavor of the food I was eating. I could only tell if the food was sweet, sour or salty. I was devastated especially after reading that it could very well be permanent. During those days I noticed how much the flavor of the food means to me but also how my appetite was affected. I just didn´t want to eat. After 3-4 days my ability to smell started to return slowly slowly to my great joy and so did my appetite.

Human experimental psychologists (also called cognitive psychologists) are in a curious position. Their subject — the human brain — is obviously the most complicated thing studied by any science. Its components (neurons) are not only very numerous and densely-connected they are also very inaccessible. Moreover brains soak up their environments in a way that other objects of study do not. It isn’t impossible to do experiments, but it isn’t easy. You can’t keep a supply of humans in your lab, for example. The difficulty of human experimental psychology is the main reason I decided to study animal experimental psychology. But the complexity of the brain is not only a difficulty but also an advantage: It means there is the most to be learned.

How to reduce flies? Here’s one way: A Chinese city suburb has set a bounty on dead flies in a bid to promote public hygiene . . . Xigong, a district of Luoyang in the central province of Henan, paid out more than 1,000 yuan ($125) for about 2,000 dead flies on July 1, the day it launched the scheme with the aim of encouraging cleanliness in residential areas. . . An Internet user said that although the office had good intentions, the action itself had made the district a laughing stock.