i was thinking about this last night with yet another mass public shooting. I can predict with 99 % certainty that the shooter is going to be a guy, right? You know, s as steve pinker likes to say, the number one predict violence is maleness. And that's the discipline that people have acquired. The extra discipline that the schinarians want,. which is to restrict our use of words to think about behavior. That restriction is completely pointless, to my mind.
Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients. Now imagine that the same doctor making a different decision depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. This is an example of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.
Shermer speaks with Nobel Prize winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman about the detrimental effects of noise and what we can do to reduce both noise and bias, and make better decisions in: medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection.