Sorry, what? I agree that we shouldn’t have unquestioning faith in anything anyone says. However, that doesn’t mean we also need to assign equal weight to ever

Sorry, what? I agree that we shouldn’t have unquestioning faith in anything anyone says. However, that doesn’t mean we also need to assign equal weight to everyone’s ideas. If someone has relevant expertise—-and being the lead author of a professional organization’s guidelines is surely relevant here—it doesn’t seem bonkers to give their persepective a bit more weight. Mentioning actual research would be better, of course. I would bet dollars to donuts that the next bit of the author’s conversation with him was “For example, in our 2005 APAM paper, we found that....” However, the newspaper article’s author probably doesn’t want to go on a long tangent trying to meta-analyze the existing research, all to make a point that’s incidental to the article’s thesis. In that context, a quote from an expert seems totally reasonable.