From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the co-author of Nudge, a groundbreaking exploration of why most people make bad judgments, and how to control for that noise.

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients — or that two judges in the same courthouse give different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different food inspectors give different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants — or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to be handling the particular complaint. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, or the same company official 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, Cass R. Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony show how noise contributes significantly to errors in all fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, police behavior, food safety, bail, security checks at airports, strategy, and personnel selection. And although noise can be found wherever people make judgments and decisions, individuals and organizations alike are commonly oblivious to the role of chance in their judgments and in their actions.

Drawing on the latest findings in psychology and behavioral economics, and the same kind of diligent, insightful research that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment — and what we can do about it.

Reader Reviews

Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer

(5/5)

Nov 21, 2024

I have been very interested in the work of the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman since around 2000 where I came across some of the ideas around over-confidence bias on an Executive MBA at Insead, and this was only cemented with his Nobel Prize win (with Amos Tversky) in 2002. I spent a lot of time over the years researching their work including their 2000 publication “Choices, Values and Frames” and applying the ideas (both Prospect Theory and the various heuristics and biases they iden...

Trevor

(3/5)

I’ve only ever come across the idea of noise in the context of information theory – something I thought this book would have made more mention of, but it didn’t, really. The idea being that the transmission of any signal is likely to involve noise (entropy being the one truly inevitable law of the universe – more than taxes, on par with death) and so figuring out ways to reduce noise ultimately depends on how important the signal is. At the start of the Life of Brian there is a perfect example.

Camelia Rose

(4/5)

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is the new book by Nobel Prize winner in Economics Daniel Kahneman. His previous book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was an eye-opener to me.Here is my understanding of the core concepts in Noise:A judgement is a decision made when a definite, invariant result can not be obtained at hand. Answering a school math question is not a judgement. Weather forecasting is still a judgement but it is less likely so because of our improved understanding of weather science and the...

Athan Tolis

(2/5)

I really have no idea who the intended audience was for this book: the authors really, really dumb it down, to the point of explaining what variance is over several pages of prose. We did not all fail high school.At the same time, they bring into the discussion some serious tools you won’t even meet until you get to graduate school in statistics, like the “percentage concordant,” which is not some type of supersonic airplane, but a rank correlation type of measure, and even provide a mini-table

Anonymous

(1/5)

A boring, amateur, and often misleading take on concepts that decision scientists, machine learning engineers, and statisticians have known and systematically studied for decades with far more rigor than these authors do. The authors are out of their depth here and contribute nothing new to the conversation. (For example, their "error equation," which they call the "intellectual foundation" of their book, is a basic concept taught in high school statistics.) Their folk, popular-press series of b...

Nick Lucarelli

Doesn't add enough to "Thinking, Fast and Slow" to warrant another book. Feels like one of those books where the author gets paid for every time they use a specific word (in this case, "noise") and have said it to themselves so much it has become a cult-like world view. In this instance, noise refers to the variations in human decision making which Kahneman attributes to a mixture of situational and systemic cognitive biases that covers old territory in the behavioural psychology world. He makes...

Cassandra Kay Silva

I loved Thinking Fast and Slow, so I picked this book up without thinking about it. However, this was certainly not as well formulated, deep or interesting. Soemthing about the writing style felt disjointed. The thoughts were not cohesive or conclusive. For a book about Noise this felt rather noisy. It read more like a textbook or lecture than I wanted it to.

Nekomancer

This is one of the worst popular press social sciences books I've ever read, and I've read many. It gets a lot wrong about what we know regarding decision-making and basic statistics. While it's true that algorithms are highly useful when applied appropriately, this book massively overstates the case in their favor while neglecting important counterpoints, among other serious problems. Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" remains one of my favorite books on research in psychology and this is an

Oleksandr Zholud

This is a non-fic about the way how uneven or ‘noisy’ are a lot of decisions we all do, some quite life changing. The ‘main’ author of the trio is Nobel prize winner for economics Daniel Kahneman, whose (together with Tversky) article was in the mid-2000s the most cited in economics and who is one of the founding fathers of behavioral economics. I read it as a part of monthly reading for November 2021 at Non Fiction Book Club group.There is a lot of talk about bias and it is definitely important...

Marks54

The Behavioral Decision Theory (BDT) authors of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Nudge are the authors of this review of theory and research on errors, biases, and noise in human decision making. These are hugely important ideas that are often poorly understood by many readers, including many who should know better.The book is well written and entertaining, with lots of examples and clear approaches for making use of these somewhat arcane ideas in our everyday decisions. Towards the end of the book,...

Viktor Lototskyi

This book might be interesting if you're new to the topic, but overall, there's much less food for my brain than I would expect based on the previous "Thinking, Fast and Slow" Half of the book is describing multiple experiments that prove that people are biased and don't act rationally or make the right judgements all the time. Like, happy and fed judges do less sentencing and so on.The rest talks that mood, weather and other factors creating noise and affect our judgements. And that's pretty mu...

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Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

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