Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

A much bigger blow to the notion of human superiority in judgment came from the finding that in 46% of the studies considered, the human experts actually performed significantly worse than the numbers and formulas alone. This means that people were clearly superior in only 6% of cases. And the authors concluded that in almost all of the studies where humans did better, “the clinicians received more data than the mechanical prediction.” As Paul Meehl, the legendary psychologist who began in the early 1950s to document and describe the poor track record of human expert judgment, summarized, There is no controversy in social science that shows such a large body of qualitatively diverse studies coming out so uniformly in the same direction as this one [the relative validity of statistical versus clinical prediction]. When you are pushing over 100 investigations, predicting everything from the outcome of football games to the diagnosis of liver disease and when you can hardly come up with a half dozen studies showing even a weak tendency in favor of the clinician, it is time to draw a practical conclusion.