Reading Reflection: Noise (Daniel Kahneman, Andrew M.

Rosenfield, Linnea Gandhi, and

Tom Blaser)

Everyone became my friend from his own opinion; none sought out my secrets from within
me. (Rumi)

In this article, we deal with a new phenomenon that has a significant impact on our
judgments and we pay less attention to it. Noise can cause a lot of problems for us humans
individually because even the weather can affect us and make System 1 more active. It
appears when in the same situation, we decide differently. Now we want to generalize these
errors in decision-making caused by noise to organizations and examine them on a larger
scale. An example from the Guardian on this subject was very interesting to me and at the
same time Contemplative. “ a 2011 study of more than 1,000 rulings by eight judges found
that those times coincided with the greatest leniency in judges’ rulings. Those who fared
worst were heard at the end of the day or just before lunch, when there was about a zero
chance of receiving a favourable ruling. How hungry or tired a judge is should have no
impact on their ruling, and yet the data says it does.”

Although we were surprised by the result of the above research, at the same time we saw that
noise is measurable and this is exactly the difference between noise and bias. Which is called
“noise Audit”. Some results in noise audit are surprising for professionals when they find out
that reliability is a big issue in their organizations, but they choose to put up with the noise
because the cure was considered too costly comes from a school that scrapped its admissions
system because it was causing conflict. One reason the problem of noise is invisible is that
people do not go through life imagining plausible alternatives to every judgment they make.

The authors recommend some solutions regarding noise effect:

-Noise Audit
-replace human judgment with formal rules—known as algorithms in some situations.
Because they are not always useful where the data are not clear or decisions that involve
multiple dimensions.
-“Wisdom of the crowd”. to asking enough people a question you will almost invariably get a
better answer than if you only ask one person