[JamesBarney]

You referenced G. Edward Griffin's book, which implicitly points to him as an authority on the subject so I think that its completely acceptable to question his authority. (I'm more familiar with ad hominem as an attack on the person giving the argument, i.e. you, not someone they reference as an authority)

I'm also not aware of James Watson's wacky ideas about biology. I know he has some controversial and maybe racist ideas about intelligence, but I don't think any of his ideas about biology are described as quackery.

And its about Bayesian inference, sometimes the mainstream is wrong. Not as often as it's right, but sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes people without credentials make large contributions to a field, not nearly as often as the credentialed make contributions but sometimes. Rarely a conspiracy theorist is right. But I think people who maybe don't know that much about economics should at least be aware of his position in the field before investing considerable amount of time reading his book.

Maybe vaccines cause autism, but it's a weird place to start a biology education.