Oh, I agree. I also think that scientists can be blinded by process, as well - that it can blind us to the obvious facts in front of our faces.*
This is the sort of danger I refer to - what is obvious to us may not be the case - and it its process that "saves" us from things that appear to be obvious (i.e. that the earth is flat, sun revolves around earth etc. - these are obvious exaggerations but it displays my point)
The same caveat wrt fooling oneself applies there; it's just not quite as formalised. Read about the "nature vs. nurture" debate, genetics "vs" environment, sometime. You may be surprised at what you find.
I'm not sure what you mean here - I am actually quite familiar with this area of research.
There is no such thing as a human scientist without bias, nor experiment without bias, when it comes to "measurement" of intelligence. We are biased by our very definitions of it. Which is why I prefer subjective measurements; I can be fooled, but in this respect, I can repeat the experiment daily, and "take observations" continually.
I think this is the wrong attitude - yes there are no human scientists without bias, which is why we have rules, "best practice", and procedure to take the human out of the equation as much as possible. I think it is a mistake to go the other way and give up attempting to be unbiased.
I spent over a decade and a half observing that cat, within situations that no researcher could ever dream up. I know what I saw, saw it repeatedly; there are no other explanations.
Remember "clever hans"? His owner spent his whole life with him, and was fully convinced he could solve mathematical problems - after all he too saw repeatedly that he tapped his hoof the correct number of times - he could not think of any other explanation for it. But that is the kicker - it doesn't mean that there isn't. If he had just set up a correct double blind experiment - he would have seen it almost instantly that his hypothesis was false.
Obviously you could very well be right - but the point is that it needs to be carefully tested before you can be sure of it. There are a many researchers that have personal hunches that X is true - and they can see it from their experience that it is very likely to be the case, but they will tell you that they are yet to find a way to prove it. Much of the real genius (and naturally hard work) in this kind of science is figuring out ways of testing that X.