More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
are unacceptably rigid or that inadvertently produce bias—we shouldn’t just give up.
want to be treated as individuals.
They may or may not be aware that individualized treatment would produce noise.
treated as individuals and hence with a kind of respect.
many cultures, this argument for case-by-case judgment has deep moral foundations. It can be found in politics, law, theology, and even literature.
When mercy seasons justice.
not bound by rules, mercy is noisy.
unquestionable human value in the opportunity to be heard.
some noise-reduction strategies might turn out to be crude;
they might forbid forms of individualized treatment that, while noisy, would produce fewer errors on balance.
response is to try to come up with a better strategy—one attuned to a wide rang...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What happens if an organization’s values change? Some noise-reduction strategies would seem unable to make space for them, and their inflexibility might be a problem, one that is closely connected with the interest in individualized treatment and dignity.
Instead it complained of the “irrebuttable presumption” and the absence of an “individualized determination.”
critics objected that an argument against “irrebuttable presumptions” would prove too much—not least because their purpose and effect are to reduce noise.
A rule-bound system might eliminate noise, which is good, but it might also freeze existing norms and values, which is not so good.
people might insist that an advantage of a noisy system is that it will allow people to accommodate new and emerging values.
We have emphasized that if some judges are lenient and others are not, then there will be a degree of unfairness; similarly situated people will be treated differently.
might decide to allow some flexibility in their judgments
flexibility ensures that as new beliefs and values arise,
In any event, noise-reduction efforts need not and should not be permanent.
Noisy systems can make room for emerging moral values,
Some of the most important noise-reduction strategies, such as aggregating judgments, do allow for emerging values.
If different people get different medical diagnoses, it is rarely because of new moral values.
We can do a great deal to reduce noise or even eliminate it while still designing processes to allow values to evolve.
By eliminating the power of adaptation, some noise-reduction strategies can have the unintended consequence of giving people an incentive to game the system.
tax code
if we eliminated noise in the tax system, clever taxpayers would
inevitably find a way to evade the rules.
there is a livel...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Because rules have clear edges, people can evade them by engaging in conduct that is technically exempted but that creates the same or analogous harms.
perhaps to tolerate an approach that allows for some noise.
A little unpredictability, or even a lot of it, might not be the worst thing.
the abstract, these arguments cannot be dismissed, but they are not terribly convincing.
we need to know whether potential wrongdoers are risk-averse or risk-seeking.
When steps are taken to reduce their discretion, many people will rebel.
employees might think that their own agency has been compromised.
If a rule is in place, it might reduce ingenuity and invention.
Demoralization is itself a cost and leads to other costs, such as poor performance.
In Howard’s view, the modern world of government regulation has gone mad, simply because it is so rigid.
would be much better to allow people to use their own creativity to figure out how to achieve the relevant goals,
important to ask about the consequences
potential increases in noise and bias.
At the very least, the costs of noise have to be given careful consideration—and they usually are not.
we will often conclude that it is unacceptable and that we should identify noise-reduction strategies that do not compromise important values.
Some efforts to reduce noise are just too rigid; they would prevent moral change.”
most of the efforts to defend noise aren’t convincing.
useful to distinguish between two ways of regulating behavior: rules and standards.
Rules are meant to eliminate discretion by those who apply them; standards are meant to grant such discretion.
Whenever rules are in place, noise ought to be severely reduced.
answer a question...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
