Search
2 interviews · 3 quotes
Conversations
In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement, Nobel Prize Winner, Daniel Kahneman together with co-authors Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show how noise helps produce errors in many fields, including medicine,…
Have you ever noticed that what is thrilling on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even exciting relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while.…
From the archive
Wherever there's judgement there's noise, and more than you think. In the criminal justice system, we saw variability between judges in the severity of their sentencing for equivalent crimes. In business, you may have a company where someone in hiring says, 'bring everyone in, I think they're great' and you end up with a company full of people who shouldn't be there.
— Cass R. SunsteinLegal scholar & behavioral economist; Obama administration official; "Nudge" theory pioneer
We have a lot of phobias around algorithms. Sometimes this is justified, but in the main, it's like being afraid of cockroaches or spiders. Algorithms aren't spiders or cockroaches, they're an instrument and sometimes will outperform human judgement terrifically well – and sometimes won't. If lives are on the line and it turns out an algorithm reduces the noise of the human decision maker and the bias, then the moral case for using the algorithm starts to look really strong.
— Cass R. SunsteinLegal scholar & behavioral economist; Obama administration official; "Nudge" theory pioneer
You can think of the human mind as a measuring instrument. We're making judgements all the time and studies show that on a day-to-day basis, when presented with the same evidence, our judgements may be different. If you see the mind as a measuring instrument, you start to see it as a scale, a bafflingly variable and noisy scale.
— Cass R. SunsteinLegal scholar & behavioral economist; Obama administration official; "Nudge" theory pioneer
More conversations
