This is a debate with a long history. In 1954, Paul Meehl, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Minnesota, annoyed an entire generation of humans when he published Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, coming down firmly on one side of the argument.38 In his book, Meehl systematically compared the performance of humans and algorithms on a whole variety of subjects – predicting everything from students’ grades to patients’ mental health outcomes – and concluded that mathematical algorithms, no matter how simple, will almost always make better predictions than people.
