Another masterpiece from Kahneman

This book is excellent. Much like Kahneman’s* definitive book on bias, Thinking Fast and Slow, Noise provides an excellent, fairly comprehensive treatment of another source of error in human judgement, which the authors define as noise. Noise is, as a term in this book, used to describe inconsistency in human judgment, as opposed to bias, which is a systematic departure from “correct” results. There is some overlap in terms here, as, for example, hungry judges systematically make harsher decisions, which is referred to as bias in Thinking Fast and Slow, but because we’re looking at error across the entire range of outcomes in a different way here, is called occasion noise. I do not believe this detracts from what the book brings to the table, but it’s worth noting that in this book, bias is used to refer to the difference between the average outcome and the “correct” outcome, or other errors across the range of outcomes such as minorities being treated differently in cases where there isn’t a “correct” outcome to measure.

What this book does not do is claim that all noise should be completely eliminated. Eliminating noise has costs. However, a wide disparity of outcomes in similar cases can be extremely unfair. Should two people with similar histories and mitigating/aggravating factors have several years of difference in sentencing for the same crime? Should the luck of who evaluates your insurance policy or what mood they’re in when they do make hundreds of dollars in difference to your premiums or policy payouts? Certain types of judgements are judgements where inconsistency is inherently unfair.

Noise looks at these judgements. It looks at hiring decisions where projection is inherently difficult and outcomes are hard to evaluate. It looks at expert judgement in fields like forensics where experts are asked to make evaluations of objective facts and whether there is noise in those outcomes as well.


I feel like I should be writing many more paragraphs about this book, but for now I’ll leave it here. This book is held to a high standard of rigor and is evidence backed throughout, again in line with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The two books combine to provide an extreme amount of information on how to improve your judgement as an individual or an organization. I highly recommend this book and it will be very close to the top of my list of “must read” books on intelligence and the human brain.



*There are three authors here and I don’t wish to downplay any role of Cass Sunstein or Oliver Sibony, which I am obviously not in position to evaluate. This book has led me to investigate their other work and likely will result in me reading at least one from each. However, Kahneman is the most well known partly because he’s one of the most influential figures in the field of human judgement, widely cited by psychologists and behavioral economists, and Thinking Fast and Slow is in my opinion is probably the best book on the brain everyone should read.

12 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

This title is useless without the pdf, which seems to be unavailable

I’ve been anticipating this title for several weeks as Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein are two intellects I admire from their previous works.

The first seven or eight minutes goes over a detailed description and discussion of illustrations which are said to be in the pdf available with the title. Each of these illustrations are said to be essential in understanding the difference between bias and noise comparing scatter diagrams of the results of four teams of shooters looking at both the front and the back of each team’s results.
It is said that these differences are one of the central themes of this book.

So imagine my frustration when I found no pdf anywhere on the Audible website. I emailed their support and heard right back from them saying that they did not know where the pdf is and that I should here back from them in two days.
That was Wednesday. I’ve heard nothing since.
I love the audible service. But this is NOT good customer service. It’s also a disservice to these authors. How could they not have planned for providing the pdf.
If they’d tested this title with just ONE user test-reader they would know that only readers with extraordinary visual memories could reliable understand the first 15 paragraphs of this book.
And wouldn’t you have a check-list of what needs to be in place before “releasing” a title?
And how long should it take to e-mail me the pdf even if they need some more time to put it up online?

Not Happy.

11 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

Very Interesting Book

Just as good and interesting as his other book
“ Thinking , fast & slow “ .

Thank you Daniel Kahneman

6 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

Disappointing

I am a big fan of Daniel Kahneman. This book is not a good reflection of his work. It is tedious, repetitive, and extremely boring. I have given up listening to it.

5 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

Insightful but repetitive

Interesting and insightful, though not surprising to anyone who has studied even introductory psychology. Also, consider the dead horse beaten. The points are introduced, retold, summarized, repeated, and reintroduced. The book could have been half the size or included twice the number of demonstrative examples.

5 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

Great info but geared for stats or analytics..

A lot of good information that everyone should know so they are more aware of bias and noise. More redundancy then needed and geared more towards those interested in statistics, analytics, etc. Certain section should definitely be required listening for doctors, lawyers, supervisors... basically anyone making decisions.

4 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

I now have two ways to address Noise

Prior to this great book, I addressed noise with a simple mantra...
You can’t spell Brian without the “I” in idiot. Thank you for helping me to not seem totally crazy!

4 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

What's wrong with this book - let me begin,,,

1) This book has a problem with noise or something similar to noise. That is it is wordy and pedantic makes this inaccessible. Perhaps being diffuse reduces clarity, which is akin to noisy which ironically is the focus of the book. 2) It introduces terms that are not generally used in later parts of the book (why bother if they are not relevant to the continued discussion ?) 3) it introduces too many Three Letter Acronyms that are not helpful to the reader. 4) Checklists are given too little discussion as a possible method of improving decision making. 5) This book is wordy and unfocused. It needs a better review prior to publication. 6) A summary at the end of each chapter would help clarify the salient. 7) The authors seem to like algorithms, but no discernable recommendations on making them. As it stands the book isn't useful or interesting. I blame it on the editor.
BTW - I only got 92 percent through the audio book.

2 les gens ont trouvé cela utile

Not as great as Thinking Fast/Slow or Nudge

I enjoyed the authors previous works more. Sunstein turns it a little too much into law reather than Psycology, which I don't appreciate. Still a great book.

1 personne a trouvé cela utile

important concepts for all

The concepts in this book are just as important and perhaps more focused that the book "thinking fast and slow" was. They are important for all levels of society to be aware of and understand to evolve and improve the culture.