---
product_id: 246140552
title: "Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment"
price: "452 kr"
currency: ISK
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.is/products/246140552-noise-a-flaw-in-human-judgment
store_origin: IS
region: Iceland
---

# Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

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- **What is this?** Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
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desertcart.com: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment (Audible Audio Edition): Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein, Jonathan Todd Ross, Random House Audio: Audible Books & Originals

Review: A five-star book that may not be for you - Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is an excellent book. But if you’re a reader of business books, Noise may not be the book for you. Most business books get right to practical applications of the author/s key ideas. This book does not. It’s an academic book with business applications. The big question is whether this book is worth your time as a business reader. The first two thirds of the book set up the later chapters. The later chapters cover many specific techniques you can use to reduce noise and improve judgement and prediction. Don't jump right to them, though. The early part of the book lays the necessary groundwork for you to understand why the techniques work. Later I’ll identify chapters with particular value for business readers. Noise is about two things that affect our judgment. Bias is systematic deviation. Noise is random scatter. We need to understand both to improve judgment. Alas, most of the time noise hardly gets any consideration while bias is the star of the show. The authors wrote this book to “redress the balance.” They say that the key theme of the book is: “wherever there is judgment there is noise --and more of it than you think.” The book is divided into six parts. Part one is about the difference between noise and bias. Part two is about human judgment. Part three is about predictive judgment. Part four describes the psychological causes of noise. Part five explores several practical issues. This is the part that would be of greatest interest to most business readers. Part six wraps up the book with techniques for measuring and overcoming noise. There’s a lot of actionable value for businesspeople, but as I said earlier, you need to read the first two thirds of the book to get to it. Here are some things that may make the book worth your time. This is an excellent overview of structured decision processes and why they often improve judgment. There are also specific chapters you may find interesting and helpful. Chapter 23 is “Defining the Scale in Performance Ratings.” Some research indicates that performance only has a 20 percent impact on the final performance evaluation. This chapter includes techniques you can use to reduce both bias and noise and make your evaluations fairer and more consistent. Chapter 24 is “Structure in Hiring.” Hiring almost always involves at least one interview. And interviewers make subjective judgments about the person they interview. We know that humans aren’t very good at sussing out whether a particular person will succeed or fail on the job. We know that different interviewers often have wildly varying assessments of the same candidate. This chapter will give you some tools for improving the results of your interviews. Chapter 25 is “The Mediating Assessments Protocol.” This has special value for you if you are a maker of deals and subject to what has been called “deal heat.” The mediating assessment protocol is a tool for overcoming deal heat and making better decisions. Chapter 28 is “Rules or Standards?” I never thought about the difference between these two until I read this chapter. You learn how rules and standards affect the amount of judgment in particular situations. In a Nutshell Noise is an excellent book about improving our judgment by reducing scattered results (noise) and reducing inconsistencies in the decision process. The first two thirds of the book establish the definitions and principles for dealing with noise. The final third of the book has several chapters with practical applications of the principles.
Review: An Important Book, Just Not Thinking Fast and Slow - 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.

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A five-star book that may not be for you
*by W***K on December 14, 2021*

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is an excellent book. But if you’re a reader of business books, Noise may not be the book for you. Most business books get right to practical applications of the author/s key ideas. This book does not. It’s an academic book with business applications. The big question is whether this book is worth your time as a business reader. The first two thirds of the book set up the later chapters. The later chapters cover many specific techniques you can use to reduce noise and improve judgement and prediction. Don't jump right to them, though. The early part of the book lays the necessary groundwork for you to understand why the techniques work. Later I’ll identify chapters with particular value for business readers. Noise is about two things that affect our judgment. Bias is systematic deviation. Noise is random scatter. We need to understand both to improve judgment. Alas, most of the time noise hardly gets any consideration while bias is the star of the show. The authors wrote this book to “redress the balance.” They say that the key theme of the book is: “wherever there is judgment there is noise --and more of it than you think.” The book is divided into six parts. Part one is about the difference between noise and bias. Part two is about human judgment. Part three is about predictive judgment. Part four describes the psychological causes of noise. Part five explores several practical issues. This is the part that would be of greatest interest to most business readers. Part six wraps up the book with techniques for measuring and overcoming noise. There’s a lot of actionable value for businesspeople, but as I said earlier, you need to read the first two thirds of the book to get to it. Here are some things that may make the book worth your time. This is an excellent overview of structured decision processes and why they often improve judgment. There are also specific chapters you may find interesting and helpful. Chapter 23 is “Defining the Scale in Performance Ratings.” Some research indicates that performance only has a 20 percent impact on the final performance evaluation. This chapter includes techniques you can use to reduce both bias and noise and make your evaluations fairer and more consistent. Chapter 24 is “Structure in Hiring.” Hiring almost always involves at least one interview. And interviewers make subjective judgments about the person they interview. We know that humans aren’t very good at sussing out whether a particular person will succeed or fail on the job. We know that different interviewers often have wildly varying assessments of the same candidate. This chapter will give you some tools for improving the results of your interviews. Chapter 25 is “The Mediating Assessments Protocol.” This has special value for you if you are a maker of deals and subject to what has been called “deal heat.” The mediating assessment protocol is a tool for overcoming deal heat and making better decisions. Chapter 28 is “Rules or Standards?” I never thought about the difference between these two until I read this chapter. You learn how rules and standards affect the amount of judgment in particular situations. In a Nutshell Noise is an excellent book about improving our judgment by reducing scattered results (noise) and reducing inconsistencies in the decision process. The first two thirds of the book establish the definitions and principles for dealing with noise. The final third of the book has several chapters with practical applications of the principles.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ An Important Book, Just Not Thinking Fast and Slow
*by A***S on May 19, 2021*

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.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review
*by P***L on February 4, 2023*

The authors introduced me to a new concept in making judgements, besides bias. In some parts it gets pretty heavy; more like a text book than anything else. The examples of widely varying judgements in all sorts of industries is appalling. They promote a balance between rigid bureaucracy/rules and “intuition” to allow some discretion so the person/group making the judgment get good feedback and involvement. Structured decisions versus random assessments are better all round. Glad I read it and glad I’m finished. 😊

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*Last updated: 2026-02-28*