The promise of AI is that it will be able to find associations and figure out things that humans normally wouldn't - so the AI is now finding associations and figuring out things that humans previously didn't notice, and we're dismissing it.
Are any of these previously unnoticed associations? I think the problem here is that they are not typically informative or predictive of “success” — whatever that means here. I don’t need a model that is essentially a shitty heuristic (or collection of them) because I can get that for free - ex. “we only recruit / hire from the ivys”.
