"Clinical versus Statistical Prediction" is Paul Meehl's famous examination of benefits and disutilities related to the different ways of combining information to make predictions. It is a clarifying analysis as relevant today as when it first appeared.

A major methodological problem for clinical psychology concerns the relation between clinical and actuarial methods of arriving at diagnoses and predicting behavior. Without prejudging the question as to whether these methods are fundamentally different, we can at least set forth the obvious distinctions between them in practical...