Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

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Reviewed in Canada on August 30, 2021

The book is easy to read in some places, rather tedious in others. It gives an original treatment of a little understood subject. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I was able to learn about an important subject.

One person found this helpful

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Asad Ansari

The book has been oversold

Reviewed in Canada on May 24, 2021

I am not sure if I would have bought the book if Daniel Kahneman was not listed on the cover.

7 people found this helpful

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Iron Paradise Fitness

One chapter of content dragged out over 379 pages

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2021

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I desperately wanted to like this book, but every page turn felt like dull slap in the face. Humans make poor, inconsistent decisions and are easily swayed. The end. Save yourself £16 and move on with your life.

82 people found this helpful

Niall O'Connor

This Book Is Noisy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2021

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For many Kahneman is a God: and one that was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his groundbreaking work in applying psychological insights to economic theory, particularly in the areas of judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. Thinking, Fast and Slow was the book that everybody had to have but, as was the case with Hawking's A Brief History of Time, one suspects that many copies went unread. Kahneman himself, in a move akin to God saying that he had difficulty sticking to the Ten Commandments said in a recent interview that "my own experience of how little this knowledge has changed the quality of my own judgement can be sobering." There were two problems with Thinking, Fast and Slow - firstly, the transition from fast to slow was unquantifiable and second, it seemed to propose an ability on the part of the average punter to tap into their unconscious. Moreover, many of those that read the book were great at spotting biases in other people rather than in themselves.

And so to Noise, a book, we are told that is designed to offer suggestions for the improvement of human judgement. As for Noise itself we are told in the book that that noise is about statistical thinking. We are also told that noise is a distinct source of error and that "the scatter in the forecasts is noise" and, that whenever we observe noise we should work to reduce it. However, we are also told that noise is invisible and embarrassing.

Noise occurs because people are idiosyncratic; they inhabit different psychological spaces; their moods are triggered by a unique set of contexts - they see and respond to the evidence in different ways. Not to mention their unconscious response to particular cues. (In many respects - seemingly the same things that trigger biases, and we are told rather confusingly that "psychological biases create system noise when many people differ in their biases.") We enter a convoluted vortex - biases cause noise - where there is noise (invisible) there will surely also be more biases at work - the two, it seems, exist in relationship that is characterised by their mutual and continuous interruption of each other. And there is actually no clear sense given as to how one should go about unpicking them.

Surprise surprise the authors pay passing homage to prediction markets, of which they say; "much of the time prediction markets have been found to do very well.") Prediction markets, in the wild (outisde of organisations) have not actually performed very well at all - because they lack insiders and do nothing more than aggregate noise. Their record on political events over the past ten years has been terrible (In the recent Chesham and Amersham By-Election in the UK, for example, the Tories were trading at 1.17 on the Betfair Betting Exchange as Polls opened - they lost). A better example, in the context of noise would have been horse racing betting markets - which contain lots of noise and bias, but which display a consistent ability to be predictive - because of the presence of insiders, who cancel out the noise.

Sadly it seems that we have gone back twenty years, to the notion of the jar of sweets and the benefits of aggregating independent judgements. In a nutshell, this book is about 380 pages too long.

51 people found this helpful

Brendan O'Sullivan

References packed with P-values! REALLY???

Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2021

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If one would expect the authors to have built their Noise (a.k.a. variance) thesis using research and references which attended to the cautions and caveats of the American Statistical Association (2016) regarding p-values and the now deprecated "statistical significance," one will be most disappointed. One should not be surprised as many of the references illustrating their thesis are in some cases a half-century old, when "statistical significance" was the key to getting published and the core of degree-earning dissertations.

Consider that the following studies listed in the Notes to the Introduction all used p-values:
(2) Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care
(4) Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication

In Chapter 1:
(14) A Survey(!!!) of 47 Judges (dated 1977) (Survey vs. Random Control Study)
(16) Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions cites a p-value <.0001 on page 5

... and similar p-value references associated with judges' differential and variance in sentencing: related to food breaks, nearby NFL Team winning recently, birthdays, outside air temperature. IMHO, the identification of these explanatory factors based on p-values are bogus and illustrative of John Ioannidis' 2005 paper: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

It is disconcerting that these scholar authors utilize many questionable references to architect a thesis about what is more commonly known as variance. As the normal Gaussian distribution is ubiquitous, one should not be startled that selected ranges within it vary significantly.

Given the presence of uncertainty and the idiosyncracy and variability of individual experience, human judgments will vary. Human judgment is noisy! DUH !!!

The authors have failed their scholarship and profession.

518 people found this helpful

Saptarshi Bhattacharyya

Not very impressive

Reviewed in India on July 3, 2021

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An average book with a lot of hype .. common knowledge packaged to sell books .. effort to monopolize thousands of years of human wisdom as one's own invention, with some colorful words

38 people found this helpful

Wappy

Dull

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 25, 2021

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Extraordinarily dull statistical and mathematical bore of a book. A repetitive cure for insomnia.

14 people found this helpful

Michael Donnellan

Very dull and boring

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 4, 2021

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Having read earlier books by two of the authors I was totally disappointed with the content and the style. I had expected much more from this book. It did nothing for me.

12 people found this helpful

10000 BC

Surprisingly awful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 19, 2021

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Truly disappointing. The obvious stated over and over again in different ways about different situations. I began the book excited to see what Kahneman did next and was thoroughly bored by page fifty.

3 people found this helpful

Mic

Used book - be careful of the quality

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2021

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The book is used. I thought it was in good conditions, however the original cover is not present and there is a very big scratch on the back side like something sharp went in. The price is too high for such a damage.

Keef

Maybe interesting but sooo damp.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 17, 2021

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Slightly soggy owing to dumb delivery to doorstep in thunderstorm

J.Trom

I wanted to like it

Reviewed in France on July 2, 2021

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It is not as good as thinking fast and slow.
It is very different, and it is ironic that the book misses its goal of not being clear enough.

6 people found this helpful

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