[kapitza]

That wasn't an appeal to authority, just an appeal to reason.

You'll have to forgive me if I prefer to trust Dr. Pryor and common sense over the Brookings Institution's "studies and accidental experiments."

If people were fruit flies and it was possible to actually conduct controlled experiments in "social science," I'd be happy to take their results seriously. Or more to the point, if controlled experiments were possible, no one would take uncontrolled experiments seriously (not to mention studies by the Brookings Institution, with its very large axe to grind -- see the Moskos commentaries on Brookings research linked above).

But the definition of science isn't "the best we can do." When actual science isn't physically practical, "the best we can do" is not science but pseudoscience. Fortunately, there are other ways to use our brains.