System noise can be broken down into level noise and pattern noise. Some judges are generally more severe than others, and others are more lenient; some forecasters are generally bullish and others bearish about market prospects; some doctors prescribe more antibiotics than others do. Level noise is the variability of the average judgments made by different individuals. The ambiguity of judgment scales is one of the sources of level noise. Words such as likely or numbers (e.g., “4 on a scale of 0 to 6”) mean different things to different people. Level noise is an important source of error in
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