"50 years of successful predictive modeling should be enough: Lessons for philosophy of science (2002)"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.217....
Idiocracy, the movie
"50 years of successful predictive modeling should be enough: Lessons for philosophy of science (2002)"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.217....
Idiocracy, the movie
From "Thinking, Fast and Slow":
"The number of studies reporting comparisons of clinical and statistical predictions has increased to roughly two hundred, but the score in the contest between algorithms and humans has not changed. About 60% of the studies have shown significantly better accuracy for the algorithms. The other comparisons scored a draw in accuracy, but a tie is tantamount to a win for the statistical rules, which are normally much less expensive to use than expert judgment. No exception has been convincingly documented."
Also interesting:
"Several studies have shown that human decision makers are inferior to a prediction formula even when they are given the score suggested by the formula! They feel that they can overrule the formula because they have additional information about the case, but they are wrong more often than not."
By distributing responsibility over many doctors (who hail from many medical schools), you make the pain more manageable. The concentrated responsibility that would result from having a single decision system make many many care decisions might be very difficult to stomach.
The thing is: I expect Watson to perform significantly better than this. If it can beat Jeopardy grandmasters consistantly and if that technology is correctly being reapplied to the medical field, Watson should easily outperform anything we had before.