Averaging Eliminates Noise With Certainty

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The judgments have to be independent of each other. If you and your colleagues were exchanging with trichat while grading, or grading the same person, that reduce the efficiency of averaging. So independence is a key element in noise reduction. We have procedures that we call decision hygiene to reduce noise and reduce bias. And achieving independence of judgment is one of the most important of them. Yo. I like to talk about this in terms of big issues like ma change or the theory of evolution,. To which sceptics, deniers, whatever you want to call hem, say they are all biasd against it.

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.