How to Control for the Noise in Governments

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If you had taken some kind of average of the procedures and everybody had applied the average, chances are it would have been more accurate and better for most countries than what they chose individually. That variability in the solutions of different countries reached for essentially the same problem is noise. I find that frustrating, but it's mostly just because of the complexity of the system, and and also the unknownness of it. And to a significant extent, it was just noisy, yes, and so much uncertainty.

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.