What Is the Main Thing of the Noise Book?

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The main theme of the book will be that nois is an underestimated problem. There is something deep about two ways of thinking, which i called statistical versus causal. And noise is clearly a statistical way of looking at things, and bias is inherently cause. If you want to reduce noise, we have a pretty good idea of what you should do in order to induce greater uniformity.

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You might be surprised by what occupies Daniel Kahneman’s thoughts. “You seem to think that I think of bias all the time,” he tells Tyler. “I really don’t think of bias that much.” These days, noise might be the concept most on Kahneman’s mind. A forthcoming book, coauthored with Cass Sunstein and “a brilliant Frenchman you haven’t heard of” is about how random variability affects our decision-making. And while we’ve spent a lot of time studying how bias causes error in judgment, Kahneman says, we aren’t thinking nearly enough about the problem of noise.

In November, Kahneman joined Tyler for a live conversation about bias, noise and more, including happiness, memory, the replication crisis in psychology, advice to CEOs about improving decision-making, superforecasters, the influence of Freud, working in a second language, the value of intuition, and why he can’t help you win arguments with a spouse.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded November 12th, 2018 Other ways to connect

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