Imagine a world where a patient goes to a clinic and gets prescribed highly addictive opioids because it is the end of the doctor’s long day – or that different sentences are given to people who committed the same crimes because one judge hasn’t had lunch yet.
These are some of the many real-world examples of “noise” that are mentioned in Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by renowned psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences Daniel Kahneman. Noise is the follow-up to his previous book Thinking, Fast and Slow, released in 2011, which brought attention to his work on how cognitive biases shape judgment. In Noise, Kahneman and his co-authors, Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, explore the other type of error impacting our judgments: noise.
The book follows the premise that “wherever there is judgment, there is noise – and more of it than you think”. If noise is so prevalent, why is it not widely spoken about? Kahneman notes that noise can only be identified in statistics, making it more difficult to track, which means it tends to go unnoticed and unmentioned.
Noise is broken up into six parts. It begins with the difference between noise (random scatter) and bias (systematic deviations), the nature of human judgment and how to measure accuracy and error. It also goes into predictive judgment, human psychology and the causes of noise, how to improve judgments and prevent error, and what is the right level of noise.
Who knew that important decisions could be swayed by seemingly redundant factors? Such as who spoke first in the meeting, what day of the week it is or whether the local football team won last night’s match. Many different types of noise are discussed in the book, but the most significant one, Kahneman says, is system noise. System