The Measure of Inaccuracy

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There is actually a mathematical theory of accuracy, and it's not very complicated. It's associated with the name of valgaus. And what you see here is two types of airor to sources of air. They are adlative. They are independent of each other. And if you reduce them by the same amount, you're reducing overall air by the same amount. So that that, in short, is what noise is. The whole theory that we start from is a theory of measurement.

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.