Noise
author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, the co-author of Nudge, and the author of You Are About to Make a Terrible Mistake! comes Noise, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments, and how to control both noise and cognitive bias. Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients - or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants - or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
18mentions
13people
2021–2025years
22% recommend67% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > No, not even you, dear person reading this. You are wrong about some basic things too. It'll vary from person to person what those are, but it is guaranteed there's something.
Kahneman has a fantastic book on this called Noise. It’s all about noise in human decision making and how to counteract it.
My favorite example was how even the same expert evaluating the same fingerprints on different occasions (long enough to forget) will find different results.
- Among all the praise for Thinking, Fast and Slow it seems that many people have missed out on Noise. Also a fantastic book that shaped how I approach situations perhaps more than the former.
Kahneman was one of those people where I was just waiting to have a problem tough enough that I'd have a good reason to email him with a question, whether or not I'd get a response. I guess no longer.
- Some authors take multiple books to fully flesh out the ideas outlined in the first, so there are some doubles recommended here.
I also found it impossible to rank books, so instead I took roughly the top 20, grouped them into themes, and then ranked the themes based on how important I think they are.
1. Deming is the primary writer of the type of management we need to be competitive: Deming, The New Economics & Out of the Crisis.
2. There is a wide variety of ways for humans to organise. Nobody is forcing the default capitalist bureaucracy on you, so be creative: Graeber, Bullshit Jobs & Dawn of Everything & The Democracy Project.
3. How people are motivated: Pink, Drive.
4. How to create a high-trust, less authoritarian, open, collaborative environment within a traditional hierarchy: Marquet, Leadership is Language.
5. Communication: Voss, Never Split the Difference. Faber, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen.
6. How to help organisations who don't want to admit what their problem is: Weinberg, Secrets of Consulting.
7. How to structure organisations and processes to deliver maximum value: Reinertsen, Principles of Product Development Flow. Ward, Lean Product and Process Development. Womack, Machine That Changed the World.
8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder.
9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages.
10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning.
11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise.
I had to leave out a few about statistics, causality inference, project portfolio investment that didn't make the top 20 cut.
- Interestingly, I’ve just listened to Kahneman’s “Noise”, which features a whole chapter about Sentencing Guidelines in the US! Very good book!
- The coauthors of Noise simply don't write as well as Kahneman did. The lack his focus and tight narrative thread.
- > reveals just how formulaic and predictable the response and banter is designed to be
Accurate. Interviews have to be formulaic and predictable. That's how you combat bias in the system.
Kahneman's book on Noise (in decision making) has a whole chapter on interviews. With careful design to avoid bias you can get to about 75% accuracy measured as correlation between Yeses and Job Performance. Without having repeatable interviews judged against a pre-defined metric, your signal becomes meaningless. You're basically flipping a coin so why even bother.
Or worse, you get people passing interviews because they went to the same school as the interviewer or whatever. In that case your un-designed un-formulaic interviews become literally worse than random.
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