2. Why do SPRs work?

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There is an aura of the miraculous surrounding the success of SPRs. But

even if there is no good explanation for their relative success, we ought to

favor them over human judgment on the basis of performance alone. After

all, the psychological processes we use to make complex social judgments

are just as mysterious as SPRs, if not more so. Further, there is no generally

agreed upon explanation for why our higher-level cognitive processes have

the success that they do. (Indeed, there is even disagreement about just how

successful they are; see, for example, Cohen 1981 and Piatelli-Palmarini

1994.) It might be that given our current understanding, replacing human

judgment with an SPR may inevitably involve replacing one mystery for

another—but the SPR is a mystery with a better track record.

There is an aura of the miraculous surrounding the success of SPRs. But

even if there is no good explanation for their relative success, we ought to

favor them over human judgment on the basis of performance alone. After

all, the psychological processes we use to make complex social judgments

are just as mysterious as SPRs, if not more so. Further, there is no generally

agreed upon explanation for why our higher-level cognitive processes have

the success that they do. (Indeed, there is even disagreement about just how

successful they are; see, for example, Cohen 1981 and Piatelli-Palmarini

1994.) It might be that given our current understanding, replacing human

judgment with an SPR may inevitably involve replacing one mystery for

another—but the SPR is a mystery with a better track record.