> Phrenology was bad because it was scientifically invalid. Well, that's not a very full story. It was scientifically invalid because it modeled mental traits

> Phrenology was bad because it was scientifically invalid. Well, that's not a very full story. It was scientifically invalid because it modeled mental traits based on the shape of the skull, and that's the important part. If you trained a model to predict traits based on accurate data about skull shape and traits, I'm confident that the algorithm would happily do that. Phrenology would still be bad regardless of what technical methods are used to do phrenology.