Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

by Daniel Kahneman

“Predictive judgments are involved in every decision, and accuracy should be their only goal. Keep your values and your facts separate.”

your mood in the moment may influence your approach to the problem and the conclusions you reach, even when you believe that your mood has no such influence and even when you can confidently justify the answer you found. In short, you are noisy.

Yu and Kuncel decided to compare judges not to the best simple model of themselves but to a random linear model. They generated ten thousand sets of random weights for the seven predictors, and applied the ten thousand random formulas to predict job performance. Their striking finding was that any linear model, when applied consistently to all cases, was likely to outdo human judges in predicting an outcome from the same information.