HUMANIST SECULAR SCIENCE STAR: DANIEL KAHNEMAN 8-18-22

ALPHABETICAL BRAIN® VOCABULARY

HUMANIST SECULAR
SCIENCE STAR
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
August 18, 2022

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NOISE:
A Flaw in Human Judgment
by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony,
and Cass R. Sunstein .
Little, Brown Spark/
Hatchet Book Group, 2021
(454 pages)

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Quote =

"noise"

"variability in judgments that should be identical"

noise-reduction strategies

'decision hygiene'."

Quote =

'multiple fact-based assessments'

'decision observer'

BOOK OUTLINE
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Note = Numbers in parentheses refer to pages

INTRODUCTION — Two kinds of error (3-)

PART 1 — FINDING NOISE (1-)

PART 2 — YOUR MIND IS A MEASURING INSTRUMENT (39-)

PART 3 — NOISE IN PREDICTIVE JUDGMENTS (107-

AUTHORS NOTES, SUMMARY,
AND BOOK DESCRIPTION
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AUTHORS NOTES = The book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, was coauthored by psychology professor Daniel Kahneman who wrote the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and business professor Olivier Sibony who wrote the book, You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake!, and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein who wrote the book, Too Much Information.

SUMMARY = The book discusses why people make bad judgments and how to make better ones by reducing the influence of "noise" --- variables that can cause bias in decision making --- and draws on examples in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, strategy, and personnel selection.

BOOK DESCRIPTION = "To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise. Sometimes, as we will see, noise is the more important problem. But in public conversations about human error and in organizations all over the world, noise is rarely recognized. Bias is the star of the show. Noise is a bit player, usually offstage. The topic of bias has been discussed in thousands of scientific articles and dozens of popular books, few of which even mention the issue of noise. This book is our attempt to redress the balance." (From Excerpt)

"In real-world decisions, the amount of noise is often scandalously high." (From Excerpt)

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EDITORIAL BOOK REVIEW
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW = Psychology professor Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow), business professor Sibony (You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake!), and legal scholar Sunstein (Too Much Information) team up for this fascinating exploration of the bias and "noise" that cause errors in human judgment. Noise, they write, is "variability in judgments that should be identical" that, when combined with one's own biases --- conscious or not --- can cause human error. The authors offer no shortage of noise-reduction strategies: "decision hygiene," for example, involves sequencing information to cut back on the possibility of confirmation bias, a technique used in forensic science analyses, where examiners get "only the information they need when they need it." The authors also suggest breaking down complex decisions into "multiple fact-based assessments"; avoiding group discussions, which increase noise, instead collecting individual opinions beforehand; and appointing a "decision observer" to identify bias. Though the writing can be jargon-heavy, readers will find plenty of insight and useful exercises. The result is dense and complex, but those who stay the course will be rewarded with an intricate examination of decision-making and sound judgment. -- Agent: Max Brockman.

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EXCERPT
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"Well trained physicians can come to different diagnoses, and even the same physician can come to different diagnoses if encountering the same data at different times. The variation is described as 'noise'."

"When physicians offer different diagnoses for the same patient, we can study their disagreement without knowing what ails the patient. When film executives estimate the market for a movie, we can study the variability of their answers without knowing how much the film eventually made or even if it was produced at all. We don't need to know who is right to measure how much the judgments of the same case vary. All we have to do to measure noise is look at the back of the target."

"To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise. Sometimes, as we will see, noise is the more important problem. But in public conversations about human error and in organizations all over the world, noise is rarely recognized. Bias is the star of the show. Noise is a bit player, usually offstage. The topic of bias has been discussed in thousands of scientific articles and dozens of popular books, few of which even mention the issue of noise. This book is our attempt to redress the balance.

"In real-world decisions, the amount of noise is often scandalously high. Here are a few examples of the alarming amount of noise in situations in which accuracy matters:

Child custody decisions are noisy. Case managers in child protection agencies must assess whether children are at risk of abuse and, if so, whether to place them in foster care. The system is noisy, given that some managers are much more likely than others to send a child to foster care. Years later, more of the unlucky children who have been assigned to foster care by these heavy-handed managers have poor life outcomes: higher delinquency rates, higher teen birth rates, and lower earnings.

Forecasts are noisy. Professional forecasters offer highly variable predictions about likely sales of a new product, likely growth in the unemployment rate, the likelihood of bankruptcy for troubled companies, and just about everything else. Not only do they disagree with each other, but they also disagree with themselves. For example, when the same software developers were asked on two separate days to estimate the completion time for the same task, the hours they projected differed by 71%, on average.

Asylum decisions are noisy. Whether an asylum seeker will be admitted into the United States depends on something like a lottery. A study of cases that were randomly allotted to different judges found that one judge admitted 5% of applicants, while another admitted 88%. The title of the study says it all: 'Refugee Roulette.' (We are going to see a lot of roulette.)

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing the assessment than on the performance being assessed.

Bail decisions are noisy. Whether an accused person will be granted bail or instead sent to jail pending trial depends partly on the identity of the judge who ends up hearing the case. Some judges are far more lenient than others. Judges also differ markedly in their assessment of which defendants present the highest risk of flight or repeat-offending.

Forensic science is noisy. We have been trained to think of fingerprint identification as infallible. But fingerprint examiners sometimes differ in deciding whether a print found at a crime scene matches that of a suspect. Not only do experts disagree, but the same experts sometimes make inconsistent decisions when presented with the same print on different occasions. Similar variability has been documented in other forensic science disciplines, even DNA analysis.

Decisions to grant patents are noisy. The authors of a leading study on patent applications emphasize the noise involved: 'Whether the patent office grants or rejects a patent is significantly related to the happenstance of which examiner is assigned the application.' This variability is obviously troublesome from the standpoint of equity. "All these noisy situations are the tip of a large iceberg. Wherever you look at human judgments, you are likely to find noise. To improve the quality of our judgments, we need to overcome noise as well as bias."

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