“Noise”

	Steven Pinker ⁦‪@sapinker‬⁩ Review of the important book by Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein. Unaided human judgment is saturated with noise, resulting in massive inefficiency, suffering, & injustice. nytimes.com/2021/05/18/boo…   5/18/21, 1:01 PM

"...noise, which Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein define as “unwanted variability in judgments.”

Sometimes we treasure variability — in artistic tastes, political views or picking friends. But in many situations, we seek consistency: medicine, criminal justice, child custody decisions, economic forecasts, hiring, college admissions, fingerprint analysis or business choices about whether to greenlight a movie or consummate a merger.

Consistency equals fairness. If bias can be eliminated and sensible processes put in place, we should be able to arrive at the “right” result. Lack of consistency too often produces the wrong results because it’s often no better, the authors write, than the random judgments of “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” And, of course, unexplained inconsistency undermines credibility and the systems in which those judgements are made... LISTEN