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• Daniel Kahneman always stresses the importance of priming: loosely, that we naturally allow the most recent experience to affect our judgment. With that in mind, many readers come to Noise hoping for something of like importance to Thinking Fast and Slow. That work summarized decades of Nobel Prize winning research that showed how human beings use heuristics to reach decisions that run counter to what a statistical, or at least well thought out approach, would make. Noise is not such a book. Most of the research are summaries of the work of other scientists, there is a lot of explanatory material that many readers will find redundant with their education and both wordiness and repeated material that should have been avoided. Nevertheless, it is an important book. Noise shows in the real world the importance of the statistician’s distinction between bias and variance. A model can be inaccurate not only by being biased and consistent but also by providing widely varying answers around a true value. While most people in research or the business world emphasize reducing bias, Kahneman and his co-authors emphasize the importance of reducing noise. Prison sentences that vary widely from different judges, contradictory diagnoses from different physicians and different evaluations of workplace performance are just some of the areas that could benefit from noise reduction. After showing its importance, the authors then analyze noise into its different components: level bias where different scales are used; pattern noise resulting from hidden factors such as personality or experience; and occasion noise which is the influence that moods and other idiosyncratic factors have that cause judgment to fluctuate (technically a subtype of pattern noise). The authors then give a serious treatment of ways to reduce noise in different settings: personal methods, such as training people to continually update their views with contrary perspectives; and collective approaches such as how to best leverage the expertise of a team charged with an important business decision. Again, much of the material can be found in other books and Noise is not the equivalent of Kahneman and Tversky’s years of original research into a previously unexplored topic. But if you expect to read a useful and important book that enables better decision making you will not be disappointed. Highly recommended. _ Aran Joseph Canes

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  2022.05.10

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