More Simplicity: Robust and Beautiful Robyn Dawes was another member of the Eugene, Oregon, team of stars that studied judgment in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1974, Dawes achieved a breakthrough in the simplification of prediction tasks. His idea was surprising, almost heretical: instead of using multiple regression to determine the precise weight of each predictor, he proposed giving all the predictors equal weights. Dawes labeled the equal-weight formula an improper linear model. His surprising discovery was that these equal-weight models are about as accurate as “proper” regression models, and
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