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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nihil who wrote (45346)	7/13/1999 12:07:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Re: IQ tests. You appear to have left a word out of the following sentence, so I am not sure I quite understand your meaning: There is a real risk in people...who are not themselves expert in design of experiments to draw scientific conclusions on work by [omission] who aren't themselves experts. By "people" who aren't themselves experts? If that is what you meant, then the BIGGEST danger is in our inability to define exactly WHO is an "expert," and in what area his expertise is, and even whether that expertise is worth anything. (After all, of what worth is the expertise of an astrologer, to take only one example?) Suppose he is an expert in psychometrics. What if eventually we decide that psychometrics is a pseudo-science? Or that its methods are still too crude to be taken seriously as a science? Or that, by itself, such expertise is meaningless unless combined with expertise in genetics? etc., etc., etc. And then there is the question of whether the "expert" is deliberately manipulating his expertise in order to advance a particular non-scientific agenda. That happens a lot more frequently than we like to acknowledge. Joan Edit: P.S. In other words, it is dangerous to defer to "experts" in an area like this one. Too much skepticism, it seems to me, is preferable to too little.