How to Reduce the Noise in a Mental Hospital

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There are difficult problems where, if you took a lot of people and average them, ther average judgment wouldn't be correct. Those are cult problem for which there is no good solution. But if you average, you would eliminate noise. And reducing noise improves accuracy. That's that invisible quantity. It is very difficult to for people to see. Yes. Well, so the last thirdo your book deals with that. What can we do about it? Which is important for we get to day lig just when you're talking about the psychiatric problems in the d s m and so on.

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.