Hi On 27 Dec 2000, Jeff Rasmussen wrote: > >scores, but not in aggregating them). In general, human judgment > >does not fare all that well relative to actuarial (i.e., > >statistical) methods. Interesting that someone posting to a > >statistical newsgroup would advocate the non-statistical approach > >to selection problems. > This is a very good point, Jim. I'm curious if you, or > others have noted the following irony. Psychology faculty > know that the literature on the clinical judgement indicates > it is very poor, yet in Search and Screen, Graduate Student > admissions Graduate Student evaluations, most largely ignore > this. When I'm on such committees I do a rank ordering based > on whatever actuarial data is available and know that doing > otherwise is just mucking around with error. Most other > faculty haruspicate via predictors such as the "number of > full professors who wrote letters of reference", "impression > of the quality of their undergraduate school" or other > voodoo. They are usually indignant when I point out that > such variables add nothing above and beyond the actuarial > data. Is there a difference between a psychologist and a > psychic, I often wonder. Indeed, psychologists have noted the irony, although much of the criticism gets directed at clinical psychologists, who continue to endorse clinical intuition, rather than actuarial tests. As I mentioned in response to another post, I did not mean to imply that psychology was any more committed to empirical/statistical approaches than is statistics. Both are equally ironic to me. Best wishes Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ =================================================================
