Noise Quotes

“To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“It is more useful to pay attention to people who disagree with you than to pay attention to those who agree.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“Causally, noise is nowhere; statistically, it is everywhere.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“Bias and noise—systematic deviation and random scatter—are different components of error.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“people are rarely aware of their own biases when they are being misled by them. This lack of awareness is itself a known bias, the bias blind spot. People often recognize biases more easily in others than they do in themselves”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“In a negotiation situation, for instance, good mood helps. People in a good mood are more cooperative and elicit reciprocation. They tend to end up with better results than do unhappy negotiators.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“More often than not, in fact, outstanding performance will become less outstanding. Conversely, very poor performance will improve. It is easy to imagine social, psychological, or even political reasons for this observation, but reasons are not required. The phenomenon is purely statistical. Extreme observations in one direction or the other will tend to become less extreme, simply because past performance is not perfectly correlated with future performance. This tendency is called regression to the mean (hence the technical term nonregressive for matching predictions, which fail to take it into account).”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“Enforcing decision hygiene can be thankless. Noise is an invisible enemy, and a victory against an invisible enemy can only be an invisible victory. But like physical health hygiene, decision hygiene is vital. After a successful operation, you like to believe that it is the surgeon’s skill that saved your life—and it did, of course—but if the surgeon and all the personnel in the operating room had not washed their hands, you might be dead. There may not be much glory to be gained in hygiene, but there are results.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“Averaging two guesses by the same person does not improve judgments as much as does seeking out an independent second opinion. As Vul and Pashler put it, “You can gain about 1/10th as much from asking yourself the same question twice as you can from getting a second opinion from someone else.” This is not a large improvement. But you can make the effect much larger by waiting to make a second guess.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“When physicians are under time pressure, they are apparently more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution, despite its serious downsides.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“If people are not making their own judgements and are relying instead on what other people think, crowds might not be so wise after all.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“People cannot be faulted for failing to predict the unpredictable, but they can be blamed for a lack of predictive humility.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“There is reason to believe that some people make better judgments than others do. Task-specific skill, intelligence, and a certain cognitive style—best described as being actively open-minded—characterize the best judges. Unsurprisingly, good judges will make few egregious mistakes. Given the multiple sources of individual differences, however, we should not expect even the best judges to be in perfect agreement on complex judgment problems. The infinite variety of backgrounds, personalities, and experiences that make each of us unique is also what makes noise inevitable.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“Diversity of opinions is essential for generating ideas and options. Contrarian thinking is essential to innovation. A plurality of opinions among movie critics is a feature, not a bug. Disagreements among traders make markets. Strategy differences among competing start-ups enable markets to select the fittest. In what we call matters of judgment, however, system noise is always a problem. If two doctors give you different diagnoses, at least one of them is wrong.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“Another formal process for aggregating diverse views is known as the Delphi method. In its classic form, this method involves multiple rounds during which the participants submit estimates (or votes) to a moderator and remain anonymous to one another. At each new round, the participants provide reasons for their estimates and respond to the reasons given by others, still anonymously. The process encourages estimates to converge (and sometimes forces them to do so by requiring new judgments to fall within a specific range of the distribution of previous-round judgments). The method benefits both from aggregation and social learning.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“People often tend to trust and like leaders who are firm and clear and who seem to know, immediately and deep in their bones, what is right. Such leaders inspire confidence. But the evidence suggests that if the goal is to reduce error, it is better for leaders (and others) to remain open to counterarguments and to know that they might be wrong. If they end up being decisive, it is at the end of a process, not at the start.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“To be actively open-minded is to actively search for information that contradicts your preexisting hypotheses. Such information includes the dissenting opinions of others and the careful weighing of new evidence against old beliefs. Actively openminded people agree with statements like this: “Allowing oneself to be convinced by an opposing argument is a sign of good character.” They disagree with the proposition that “changing your mind is a sign of weakness” or that “intuition is the best guide in making decisions.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“Causal thinking helps us make sense of a world that is far less predictable than we think. It also explains why we view the world as far more predictable than it really is. In the valley of the normal, there are no surprises and no inconsistencies. The future seems as predictable as the past. And noise is neither heard nor seen.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“the process of understanding reality is backward-looking”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“you can safely expect that people who engage in predictive tasks will underestimate their objective ignorance. Overconfidence is one of the best-documented cognitive biases. In particular, judgments of one’s ability to make precise predictions, even from limited information, are notoriously overconfident. What we said of noise in predictive judgments can also be said of objective ignorance: wherever there is prediction, there is ignorance, and more of it than you think.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise

“good judgments depend on what you know, how well you think, and how you think.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”)”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“Groups can go in all sorts of directions, depending in part on factors that should be irrelevant. Who speaks first, who speaks last, who speaks with confidence, who is wearing black, who is seated next to whom, who smiles or frowns or gestures at the right moment—all these factors, and many more, affect outcomes.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“On the other hand, a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“When Vul and Pashler let three weeks pass before asking their subjects the same question again, the benefit rose to one-third the value of a second opinion.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

“As we noted in chapter 12, our normal way of thinking is causal. We naturally attend to the particular, following and creating causally coherent stories about individual cases, in which failures are often attributed to errors, and errors to biases. The ease with which bad judgments can be explained leaves no space for noise in our accounts of errors.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Noise