[eesmith]

This sounds like axe grinding rather than any serious commentary.

I mean, I can think many other things you could have mentioned: would he have had his honors stripped if he had a long record of drunk-driving? If he were a pedophile? If his secret espionage for the Soviets was finally revealed? And so on.

Addressing your topic point on, Watson has a decades long history of making racist, sexist, misogynist, and similar comments - and often justified by pseudo-science. When it was mostly white men who dominated the field, it was regarded as "that's just Jim being Jim."

In 2007 he apologized for his behavior and retracted his statements like 'He also said that while he wished the races were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”' His recent statements on PBS effectively cancel that retraction.

By comparison, if his only comment along these lines had been that men have better verbal skills than women, then it's extremely unlikely he would have had his honors stripped. Which means I also think that if he had claimed the opposite - that women have better verbal skills than men - then I also doubt that he would have had his honors stripped.

Do you know of any similar case where a man was stripped of honors solely because he said that he thought men have better verbal skills than women? Or that he thought men had better physical perception than women? Off-hand I can't think of any, so I can't see why the reverse would be any different.

[pmdulaney]

Well, I don't think that anyone believes that men, in general, have better verbal skills than women. But there was a guy at Google who got in trouble for saying that men, in general, have better STEM skills than women.

Axe grinding? I suppose. But I too hold Watson's views to be highly distasteful. But I think it is important to balance that sense of repugnance with two principles: 1) Free speech; and 2) the idea that if something is actually true -- and I'm not asserting that Watson has captured the truth here -- then there must not be a penalty for saying it, if it is said in a non-inflammatory way.

And you do raise an excellent question: Would Watson's honors have been stripped if it were proved that he had been a Soviet spy?

[eesmith]

The "guy at Google" 1) didn't have any honors stripped, and 2) said far more than simply "men, in general, have better STEM skills than women". Surely to a degree far more than you posited in your original statement.

How is this a free speech issue? Watson continues to have his full free speech rights, yes? How is he being censored?

This looks much more like it's a right of free association issue. Cold Spring Harbor Labs has broad rights to associate - or disassociate - with whomever they wish.

Since so many people want to place free speech on some sort of pedestal, and claim that it's of overriding importance, I'll quote John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty", chapter IV, "Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual", which seems appropriate here:

> We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.

The people of CSHL are exercising their liberty by choosing the society most acceptable to them.

I don't understand the relevancy of your point 2. All research points out that Watson is in the wrong.

I also caution that "non-inflammatory speech" is tricky. Who gets to decide? In general, those in power are those who want to maintain status quo and are also those who get to decide what 'inflammatory' means. On topic, we see that 100 years ago CSHL was one of many organizations in the American Eugenics movement, which tended to favor the "Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples". Somehow their calls for sterilization and even eradicatation of large numbers of the poor and powerless wasn't seen as inflammatory, while the speech of black people who called for equal treatment was seen as inflammatory, and could even be grounds for lynching.