This week's Commonplace post is a summary of a landmark paper from the Good Judgment Project — i.e. Satopää et al's BIN model. It gives us more evidence that it's better to tamp down on noise to improve decisions, instead of fighting cognitive biases.
Conversation
The hard bit here is explaining the math in a way that’s somewhat understandable. More proficient readers would probably appreciate that what the authors call “bias, information, and noise” are really statistical artefacts.
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I’ve left the actionable takeaways to next week’s post — what is important here is simply “Wait a minute, Kahneman and Tetlock and all the rest of the cognitive biases crowd seem to be focusing more on noise reduction these days; we should probably pay attention!”
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Some interventions are already known, for instance: create process around decisions, aggregate judgments when it’s cheap to do, and augment human decisions with algorithms.
All easier said than done, but at least more tractable when compared to fighting cognitive bias!
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Most importantly, Kahneman’s got a new book that’s due in May: amazon.com/Noise-Human-Ju
And it’s all about Noise. I’m going to bet that noise reduction will be a bigger thing in the coming years 😉
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