I just finished reading this book on noise in human judgement, and I think it’ll take a while to process. This book does an excellent job of introducing the concepts of noise (versus bias) and illustrates how and why it causes problems for organizations and individuals.
As in Kahneman’s previous book Thinking Fast and Slow the writing style is very accessible and avoids being too technical in order to get across the concepts to the widest possible audience. Without much academic jargon we can pick up the concepts quickly, and I really like the wealth of real world examples.
The value in this book for me was in the business examples, the refresher on statistical analysis (it has been a while!), and the section discussing “super forecasters” and the differences in the ways that they think that make for more accurate decisions. It was good to hear that the skills they have can be learned by others.
Other topics that I was intrigued by was the concept of the use of formulas and algorithms to eliminate noise in decisions, and the surprising relatively high amount of accuracy in them compared to making our own “intuitive” decisions. I also liked the idea of getting free of our “default way of thinking” and using “outside cases” to consider deeply the decision to be made.
Hopefully I can use some of these concepts in the future as part of work and judgements elsewhere – the authors did a very good job of explaining how even though the reduction of noise is not as glamorous as reducing bias, it is an equally important goal.
The next book I’ll be reading is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
