Noise
by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein · first published 2021
23% recommend62% neutral15% critical
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 -
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…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.
on “How I operated as a Staff engineer at Heroku (2020)” ↗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…
on “Daniel Kahneman has died” ↗Interestingly, I’ve just listened to Kahneman’s “Noise”, which features a whole chapter about Sentencing Guidelines in the US! Very good book!
on “John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US” ↗…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)…
on “Google scrambles to manually remove weird AI answers in search” ↗…mean everything is on ArviX anyways. So instead of bids you have randomization. Kahneman's latest book talks about this and it's been making the rounds on NPR, NyTimes etc... https://www.amazon.com/Noise-Human-Judgment-Daniel-Kahneman/...
on “Collusion rings threaten the integrity of computer science research” ↗…performance of the algorithm [2] but I think Fryer has too much faith in machine learning. I suspect a machine may simply learn that nothing beats a middle-class kid who did well at high school. [1] The book Noise by Daniel Kahneman et al has a fascinating description about how algorithms are superior to human judgement: "Meehl reviewed twenty studies in which a clinical judgment was pitted against a mechanical…
on “Affirmative action in college admissions doesn’t work – but it could” ↗I would be shocked by this, but I just finished reading "Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment" by Daniel Kahneman (the author of Thinking fast and slow") and therefore I'm not at all surprised. In the book they show many well-documented examples where experts (including…
on “I Went to 50 Different Dentists: Almost All Gave a Different Diagnosis” ↗…evaluate candidates based on real conversations The problem is bias. Study after study has shown that those "casual chat" interviews are worse than useless at measuring anything at all. Kahneman's book, Noise, has entire chapters on this problem. The only solution that empirically seems to work are a) interview panels and b) pre-defined standard rubrics with clear evaluation criteria. Defining those rubrics…
on “Ask HN: Am I hurting my programming career by not exploring AI coding tools?” ↗This article also interesting "Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman is out with a new book on why we all make such bad judgments" https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/14/nobel-prize-winner-daniel-ka... _"Noise audits"_ "For example, if members of a radiology team provide widely different analysis of the same X-ray of the same patient, that is a noise problem. Kahneman describes a protocol for a noise audit…
on “Daniel Kahneman:“Clearly AI is going to win. ”” ↗I just started on Kahneman's Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment 2 days ago. I mean it took so long for Kahneman and Tversky ideas on bias to disperse that we can even be talking about bias in this context. Bias isn't even the real problem…
on “Biases in AI Systems” ↗Wonderful. I am such a Taleb fan boy but have been putting off Designing Data Intensive Applications. I am starting on it this afternoon from this post. I just started on Daniel Kahneman's Noise. It will be disappointing if it isn't one of these type of books.
on “Ask HN: Which book or course gave you an unfair advantage?” ↗There are already many effective processes that have been developed, schools however don't want to implement them for varying reasons (blind marking for example). An example from Daniel Kahneman's Noise (I'm paraphrasing) - When university faculty was told of their bias in marking from hunger/mood/normal daily human sways, why didn't the first person marking it write the grade on the back so the second…
on “Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for the 12th straight year” ↗…remove - if anything, I'm sure I could easily add to them if I go through each one's blogroll. The last non-fiction books on the other hand were huge disappointments. Even Daniel Kahneman, to my surprise: Noise had a good idea and was well written, but could easily have been 1/4 of its size or less. I don't have either the time or patience to go through 75% fluff. It feels more and more like books are written…
on “I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books” ↗…positive entries led to inflated subsequent scores, whereas false negative initial votes had small long-term effects. This seems very relevant to HN. I found a reference to the linked article in the book "Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment" by Kahneman, Sibony & Sunstein https://readnoise.com/
on “Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment (2013)” ↗I just read Noise by Kahneman, Sibony, Sunstein, and I'm not sure that we should talk about politics at all anymore. We should think about politics, yes! Read about politics, listen about politics, and experience politics…
on “Ask HN: Is it unwise to post conservative opinions as a tech worker?” ↗