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Noise

Written by: Daniel Kahneman,Olivier Sibony,Cass R. Sunstein
Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
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Publisher's Summary

From the best-selling 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.

Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times best sellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment - and what we can do about it.

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2021

* This audiobook contains a downloadable PDF which includes figures from the book.  

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio. 

©2021 Daniel Kahneman , Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein. Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2021 (P)2021 Random House Audio

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Excellent. A critical read for professionals who exercise judgment!

Excellent. A critical read for professionals who exercise judgment!

This and “Thinking Fast and Slow” are seminal.

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Mind blowing facts that we faced but not recognized !

The beginning of the book is theoretical/empirical but the rest is absolutely practical.
Chapter 25 the mediating assessment protocol is highly recommended for any leader/CEO/decision maker.

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  • Z28
  • 2021-05-31

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.

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  • JDM
  • 2021-05-21

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.

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  • Peter Schrier
  • 2021-05-28

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.

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  • Rick W
  • 2021-05-26

Shallow and a waste of time

You know what the real lesson here is, don’t pre-order crappy books. In a world filled with noise, these authors provide an example of exactly what not to do through their book.

I really wanted to like this. I want someone who’s not Nate Silver to explain signal to noise ratios and help me curate better information in my life. But this book isn’t it. This book is literally noise. Worthless noise in an already noisy world.

Someone like Kahneman, a founder of behavioral economics, you would think would have interesting new research and considered takes on how to cut through the amount of chatter out there in the world. It’s an important problem. But It seems like behavioral economics has stalled out into finding goofy and minor errors in our cognitive biases. Hey look! two people came to different answers when asked to mentally calculate an abstract concept. Look at how I can create methodological dubious and unreplicatible studies that confuse people into making decisions against their best interests. Am I a behavioral economist yet?

I’m so sick of people writing shitty books to promote themselves as “thought leaders” and charge more for their consulting. I expected a better book out of these authors but found myself extremely disappointed in the shallowness of the ideas and writing. It’s a bad regurgitation of ideas that has been done better in other places.

If you like feeling cocktail-party smart without actually having to put in the effort to be smart, you will probably like this. It’s full of pithy blurbs. Memorize a few and you’ll impress your wife’s-bosses-cousin in no time. But I don’t really think it says anything that hasn’t been beaten to death before. Essentially decisions come down to judgments and judgments can be skewed through bias and noise. Noise = randomness except it’s a lot harder to charge six figure consulting fees when you say “oh jeez, there’s just a lot of randomness in here.” Much sexier to call it a “noise audit” and point to your crappy book. People are not great predictors but we sure are predictably gullible. Then this book plays a bad game of telephone where the authors summarize research they did not do in an effort to make their publishers and publicist happy by hitting a page count.

Read Phillip Tetlocks “Expert Political Judgement” and “Superforcasting” for better and more in depth research on the core topics covered here. Honestly this book felt like a psych sophomore five solo cups of thunder punch deep trying to explain their thoughts on cognitive bias. I’ve written papers in an Adderall haze that involve more original work. Don’t waste your time.

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  • Di's
  • 2021-05-31

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.

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  • Renata Santos Haberland
  • 2021-11-17

Mostly noise

A one pager turned into a boring book. I forced myself to listen to the end, but the book is an endless repetition of the same arguments. It is mostly noise...

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  • James
  • 2021-09-08

Totally boring...

Should have condensed the theory into one chapter. Listening to this is like slow torture.

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  • Mario K.
  • 2021-05-19

Very Interesting Book

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

Thank you Daniel Kahneman

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  • BrianBrawdy
  • 2021-05-18

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!

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  • Casper
  • 2021-06-01

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.

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