Capturing the Magic

Ask a successful startup seed investor, "How do you do it?" Press harder and you will likely hear, "It takes years of apprenticeship and experience in pattern recognition." The myth of expert magic was challenged decades ago but it still persists. If you wanted to know whether you had cancer or not, you were better off using the algorithm that the researchers had created than you were asking the radiologist to study the X-ray. The simple algorithm had outperformed not merely the group of doctors; it had outperformed even the single best doctor.