From Lilienfeld, et al.’s 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology (p. 228-30):
Over half a century ago, the brilliant clinical psychologist Paul Meehl … provided an insightful analysis of clinical decision-making, outlining two approaches to this task. He referred to the traditional approach, which relies on judgment and intuition, as the clinical method. When using the mechanical method, a formal algorithm (set of decision rules) such as a statistical equation or “actuarial table” is constructed to help make decisions in new cases. Insurance companies have used actuarial tables for decades to evaluate risk and set premiums. For example, they can use knowledge of someone’s age, sex, health-related behaviors, medical history, and the like to predict how many more years he or she will live….
Meehl … reviewed the 20 studies available at the time to compare the accuracy of clinical and mechanical predictions when researchers supplied both the practitioner and the formula with the same information. To the shock of many readers, he found that mechanical predictions were at least as accurate as clinical predictions, sometimes more. Other reviewers have since updated this literature … which now includes more than 130 studies that meet stringent criteria for a fair comparison between the two prediction methods. They’ve found that Meehl’s central conclusion remains unchanged and unchallenged: Mechanical predictions are equally or more accurate than clinical predictions. This verdict holds true not only for mental health experts making psychiatric diagnoses, forecasting psychotherapy outcome, or predicting suicide attempts, but also for experts predicting performance in college, graduate school, military training, the workplace, or horse races; detecting lies; predicting criminal behavior; and making medical diagnoses or predicting the length of hospitalization or death. At present, there’s no clear exception to the rule that mechanical methods allow experts to predict at least as accurately as the clinical method, usually more so….
Some object to mechanical prediction because “probability is irrelevant to the unique individual.” In particular, they claim that knowing the outcomes for other people is of no use when making a decision for a new patient, because “every person is different.”
What I find interesting, there, is that we have no qualms about being treated as “numbers in actuarial tables” when it comes to paying for health insurance, split down by men vs. women, or by smokers vs. non-smokers, and perhaps someday by healthy vegetarians vs. heart-disease-prone meat-eaters, etc., and certainly someday by genetic flaws which we can’t do anything about, and have been stuck with through no fault of our own … and we certainly don’t consider the (actuarial tables) practice itself to be the least bit immoral … yet if you judge others by their membership in, say, a high-crime group (e.g., poor blacks), you’re guilty not merely of judging individuals based on the characteristics of their group, but of a moral fallacy (and a moral failing).
If racism and sexism are morally wrong (for judging people by the characteristics of their group), then group-characteristic-based insurance must be equally morally wrong. And so are all other forms of mechanical prediction, even though they work better (i.e., “as well as or better,” which on average is better) than the “clinical method” of treating people as individuals.
That is, the most-efficient way of doing things, which causes the least total suffering, and the greatest benefit for the greatest number, is also morally wrong.
Ponder that, Utilitarians!
BTW, meat-eaters should indeed be evaluated against different actuarial tables than vegetarians are. You don’t even need to be a vegetarian to agree with that: if you’re a moronic, magical-thinking Steveospheric carnivore, for example, you surely think that vegetarians are inherently sickly creatures, who would therefore be a drain on the health-care industry. So you can endorse treating them differently even while—nay, especially while—chawing down on a thick, cholesterol-laden steak.
You’d be wrong, woefully wrong, about the respective health effects; but you’d be paying through your own pocketbook (not mine) for that privilege, so “everyone wins” (except the animals, and the environment in general, in the waste of water and grain, and the polluted agricultural runoff).
Plus, as a meat-eating Steveospheric moron, you’ll likely die sooner; so again, “everyone wins.”
