Idea Ripper // ArchiveCards: 1555 [Live] | Updated: 2026-10-14
Card #c52IR // #c52Synthesis

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.

— In our words · Source: Machine, Platform, Crowd (Andrew McAfee & Erik Brynjolfsson)

[Use when]

When someone defends expert intuition against the data.

[Why it matters]

Meehl's summary is the kill shot for expert judgment: across a hundred-plus investigations, the evidence points one direction — use the formula.

More from Machine, Platform, Crowd

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