review of book noise

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Judges walk from Westminster Abbey to the Palace of Westminster, marking the beginning of the legal year.

Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein review – the price of poor judgment

Whether in legal sentences or medical diagnoses, mistakes happen every day. Could the wisdom of crowds offer a solution to this ‘noise’?

I magine you have committed a crime. If you are up on your behavioural economics you will be hoping to have your case heard either early in the day or just after a scheduled break such as lunch: 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.

But what about the judge who is assigned your case in the first place? That shouldn’t matter either but, yet again, the data says it very much does. A 1974 study of 50 judges setting sentences for identical (hypothetical) cases found that “absence of consensus was the norm”. And the sentences didn’t just slightly differ by judge: they varied wildly. Depending on the luck of the judge lottery, the same heroin dealer was sentenced to anything between one and 10 years, a bank robber received sentences ranging between five and 18 years, while an extortionist faced anything between three years with no fine at all to 20 years plus a $65,000 fine. Similar studies were repeated in 1977 and 1981, all with the same sobering findings – and they are likely to underestimate the scale of the problem, since according to the august authors of Noise, “real-life judges are exposed to far more information than what the study participants received in the carefully specified vignettes of these experiments”.

This scattergun variability in judgments of all kinds, from court sentencing to insurance underwriting to medical diagnosis, is what the authors call, well, noise. Like its more famous cousin, bias, noise is an error in judgment. The authors distinguish between the two using a shooting-range metaphor. If all the shots land systematically off-target in the same direction, that’s bias; by contrast, noise is all over the place. Some of the shots might even be on target, because the issue here is not missing the target but a lack of consistency. Given the same facts, one criminal gets life and another who is equally guilty gets off.

Which brings us to the other significant distinction between bias and noise: to detect bias, you have to know what the right answer is, or to use the book’s metaphor, you have to be standing at the front of the target, so you can see the bullseye. Noise requires no such particulars. It is detectable no matter which side of the target you’re standing on, since all you need to know is whether or not there is variability.

And you should want to detect noise, the authors argue, because it is not only unfair, it can be hugely costly. For example, one study found that the average difference in insurance premium quotes depending on the underwriter is 55%. This means that if one underwriter sets the premium at $9,500, another is likely to set it at $16,700. This matters not just to the client, whose premium shouldn’t depend on whether their case is handled by John or Jane, it also costs the company: overpriced contracts lose business, while underpriced contracts lose money. One senior executive at the insurance company where the study was conducted estimated the annual cost of noise in underwriting in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But while businesses and your average person on the street therefore have an interest in seeing noise reduced, we are mostly just ignoring it. There are all sorts of reasons for this, not least that, as the authors point out, humans are much better at thinking causally than statistically. This means it’s easier for us to attend to bias, where we can tell a story to explain an unexpected decision (he let her off because she looks like his daughter), than to noise, which is only visible in aggregate. We have to make an effort to see noise – or as the authors advise, conduct a “noise audit”, instructions for which they handily include in an appendix at the end. They also include a range of noise-reduction strategies, from substituting comparative judgments for absolute judgments (ie instead of grading essays one by one, putting them in order from best to worst), to replacing humans with the ultimate in noise-free decision-making: algorithms.

The problem is, not everyone who conducts a noise audit will go on to commit to noise-reduction strategies. For example, following the various studies in the 1970s and 80s highlighting unacceptable noise in sentencing, the US passed the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, which established mandatory sentencing guidelines. These changes were successful in reducing noise but were wildly unpopular with judges who resented the removal of their discretion, and in 2005 the guidelines were downgraded to advisory. Noise went back up – but judges were happier. Whether or not justice was better served is another question.

Another example of an organisation choosing to put up with noise because the cure was considered too costly comes from a school that scrapped its admissions system because it was causing conflict. One of Noise ’s most repeated recommendations for noise reduction (and there is a lot of repetition in this book) is that judgments should, where possible, make use of the “wisdom of the crowd”. This phrase refers to the finding that if you ask enough people a question you will almost invariably get a better answer than if you only ask one person – but there is a caveat: the opinions must be independent from each other in order to avoid “groupthink”. And this is how the school ran its application process: two people independently read and rated an application before making a joint decision. This made admissions less noisy but also led to arguments. The school chose to live with the noise.

As for algorithms, Daniel Kahneman et al lament, we are unwilling to tolerate mistakes in computers in the way that we tolerate them in humans. This may well be unreasonable of us, but on the other hand, when algorithms make mistakes they can be huge: gig workers in the US have been locked out of earning a living by trigger-happy algorithms erroneously detecting fraud; an algorithm designed by Amazon systematically downgraded female job applicants . Meanwhile, algorithms remain unreasonably opaque, their inner workings protected under proprietary software laws, meaning recourse is often impossible. “We’re not discriminating, it’s just the algorithm,” said Apple’s hapless customer service reps in response to a man whose wife was given a 20th of his credit limit despite having a higher credit score. Multiply this problem by a thousand for older people or anyone without good internet access.

To be strictly fair, the authors do acknowledge the existence of algorithmic bias, although they perhaps underestimate its magnitude. A crucial point they do not acknowledge, however, is that algorithms don’t merely replicate human biases, they amplify them – and by a significant amount. One that was trained on a dataset where pictures of cooking were 33% more likely to involve women than men ended up associating pictures of kitchens with women 68% of the time. Until these issues are ironed out we should beware of social scientists bearing algorithm-driven gifts.

The vague hand-waving over the serious societal implications of AI is all of a piece with a book that, while it undeniably has a point, and an important one, feels, to be blunt, half-baked. If ever there were a book in search of an editor, it is this one. Noise could have been half the length and it would have been a far better book for it. Instead, weighed down by flabby vignettes complete with imaginary (and terrible) dialogue that add nothing except pointless pages, it is a slog. This is disappointing given the authors’ previous output and it’s tempting to wonder the extent to which this study was a product less of an idea whose time had come than of a publisher’s desire for the next bestseller. Towards the end comes the line: “Noise is the unwanted variability of judgments, and there is too much of it.” Rather like the book itself, I found myself thinking.

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A FLAW IN HUMAN JUDGMENT

by Daniel Kahneman & Olivier Sibony & Cass R. Sunstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2021

Abundant food for thought for professionals of all types as well as students of decision science and behavioral economics.

A sprawling study of errors in decision-making, some literal matters of life and death.

You go to a doctor complaining of chest pains. The doctor orders an angiogram. The hospital requires a second opinion before authorizing surgery, and the second doctor disagrees on the extent to which a specific blood vessel is blocked. These unpredictable disagreements over the same data are what Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein call “noise,” a species of human error that happens whenever such higher-order judgments are involved. Noise, they write, is rampant in medicine, where “different doctors make different judgments about whether patients have skin cancer, breast cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, depression, and a host of other conditions.” Noise is especially prevalent in psychiatry, they add, where subjective opinion is more pronounced than in other disciplines. A cousin of bias, noise is difficult to isolate and correct. In forensic science, the authors write, noise is implicated in nearly half of all misidentifications of perpetrators and wrongful imprisonments. Unlike some categories of error, noise is often not helped by the introduction of more information. Writing in often dense but generally nontechnical prose, the authors offer strategies for reducing noise. One is to average out predictions in, say, stock market performance, since “noise is inherently statistical.” Another is to consult the smartest people you can find; while they may not be flawless, “picking those with highest mental ability makes a lot of sense.” Since error combines with snap decisions, the authors endorse rigorous review and other strategies for noise reduction and “decision hygiene” as well as developing habits of mind that acknowledge both bias and error and favor examining the opinions of those with whom one disagrees as dispassionately and fairly as possible. “To improve the quality of our judgments,” they urge, “we need to overcome noise as well as bias.”

Pub Date: May 18, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-316-45140-6

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Little, Brown Spark

Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | BUSINESS | LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT & COMMUNICATION | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS WITH A JEW

by Emmanuel Acho & Noa Tishby ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024

An important dialogue at a fraught time, emphasizing mutual candor, curiosity, and respect.

Two bestselling authors engage in an enlightening back-and-forth about Jewishness and antisemitism.

Acho, author of Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man , and Tishby, author of Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth , discuss many of the searing issues for Jews today, delving into whether Jewishness is a religion, culture, ethnicity, or community—or all of the above. As Tishby points out, unlike in Christianity, one can be comfortably atheist and still be considered a Jew. She defines Judaism as a “big tent” religion with four main elements: religion, peoplehood, nationhood, and the idea of tikkun olam (“repairing the world through our actions”). She addresses candidly the hurtful stereotypes about Jews (that they are rich and powerful) that Acho grew up with in Dallas and how Jews internalize these antisemitic judgments. Moreover, Tishby notes, “it is literally impossible to be Jewish and not have any connection with Israel, and I’m not talking about borders or a dot on the map. Judaism…is an indigenous religion.” Acho wonders if one can legitimately criticize “Jewish people and their ideologies” without being antisemitic, and Tishby offers ways to check whether one’s criticism of Jews or Zionism is antisemitic or factually straightforward. The authors also touch on the deteriorating relationship between Black and Jewish Americans, despite their historically close alliance during the civil rights era. “As long as Jewish people get to benefit from appearing white while Black people have to suffer for being Black, there will always be resentment,” notes Acho. “Because the same thing that grants you all access—your skin color—is what grants us pain and punishment in perpetuity.” Finally, the authors underscore the importance of being mutual allies, and they conclude with helpful indexes on vernacular terms and customs.

Pub Date: April 30, 2024

ISBN: 9781668057858

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon Element

Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024

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by Emmanuel Acho

UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATIONS WITH A BLACK BOY

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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by Robert Greene

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Kaibalyapati Mishra

January 20th, 2022, book review: noise: a flaw in human judgment by daniel kahneman, olivier sibony and cass r. sunstein.

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment , Daniel Kahneman , Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein explore how ‘noise’ affects human judgment and reflect on what we can do to address this. This novel book will help readers to better understand the processes we undertake in decision-making and how to encourage more informed and principled decisions, writes Kaibalyapati Mishra .

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment . Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein. William Collins. 2021.

‘Where there are six economists, there are seven opinions.’ – Barbara Wootton

Human judgments are eccentric. Many factors influence them and vary across individuals, times, situations. Some judgments are biased towards or against certain phenomena, showing predictable systematic deviation from desirable human behaviour, while some are unpredictable; they are noisy . In Noise , the authors highlight such crucial flaws of human judgment which they define as random/chaotic deviations from targeted behaviour that invite no causal explanation. Written by Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2002, and writer of Thinking Fast & Slow ), eminent legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein (writer of Nudge ) and Olivier Sibony, Professor of Strategy & Business Policy at HEC Paris, the book elaborates on how to find and measure the occurrence of ‘noise’, while detailing how we can avoid such flaws at length.

Starting from the use of heuristics (the mental shortcuts that humans frequently use to arrive at conclusions in decision-making) to undue emphasis on scales and patterns, bias can shape human judgment through various means. When assessing their ability to finish a task on time, individuals overestimate their capacities, committing planning fallacy bias. To avoid answering a difficult question (how is your life going?), people answer the easier alternative (how am I feeling now?), substituting judgments with something that more easily comes to mind, thereby committing availability heuristics bias. Similarly, we often tend to collect pieces of evidence that confirm our existing beliefs, which is known as confirmation bias. Thus, reserved judgments (prejudgments) guided by our feelings sometimes direct our thinking, which is an instance of ‘after heuristics’ . As the popular saying goes, ‘first impressions last longest’, indicating that initial judgments form a coherence (or halo) that directs our evaluation of others. This is a result of excessive coherence , which dictates our reluctance to change our predisposed conclusions.

Yet, noise also enjoys a huge hold. Imagine that you are a judge at a sentencing hearing. Will you be less harsh on the convicted person if the date of the hearing is your birthday? Will you be harsher if they belong to a community other than yours? In the latter case, the outcome of your judgment can be termed biased. However, in the former case, it is difficult to predict the deviation of the outcome. This is noise . The authors write that ‘the unfettered discretion the law confers on those judges and parole authorities responsible for imposing and implementing the sentences’ (18) often leads to different sentencing decisions between judges and even for the same judge over time. Such deviations can be revealed through noise audits, whereby the same people make judgments about several cases and their judgments are studied. They can also be dealt with through specific policies, such as assigning a bench of judges to a case to reduce noise.

In many other cases, individual judgments are made under the illusion of agreement : the feeling that ‘other people see the world much the way I do’ (31) , a position of naïve realism. Decisions taken only once (singular decisions) and decisions taken over continuous intervals (recurrent decisions) can both exert noise in decision-making. Thus, the authors write that ‘a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once’ (38). It is evident that just as singular decisions add up, noise doesn’t cancel itself out. It too adds up.

Scribbles on white paper and a pencil with a broken tip

If human decisions are the outcomes and judgments are the means, then the construction of decisions is measured by the instrument of the human mind. The variability of judgments indicates the deviation taken from the average of decisions made under familiar conditions over time (measured statistically as standard deviation). A major source of such variability is selective attention and recall, which indicates partial attention towards attributes that make the judgment imbalanced. However, noise due to variability can relate to within-person variability (where one person makes different decisions regarding the same judgment over time) or between-person variability (where different people make different judgments regarding the same situation). Thus, the measurement and reduction of such variability (noise) should have the same priority given to bias, as both bias and noise are the two constituents of judgmental errors.

Just as adding together individuals constitutes a group, adding together individual decisions constitutes group judgments. These are expected to reduce noise, but they are conditioned by group dynamics. Among a number of factors, social influence is a major driver of noise. If individuals in a group are connected and dependent on one another, their judgment is assumed to be interdependent and influenced by that of others. From choosing a song that is labelled as ‘most listened to’ to voting for a political party that attracts large rallies and provokes Twitter trends, these might indicate noisy decisions. This tendency to follow the masses irrespective of personal inclination has been termed ‘the wisdom of the crowd’. Thus, social influence is a problem that reduces group diversity without diminishing collective error. Other forms of social influence like information cascades (where people tend to reject the possibility that the rest are influenced) and group polarisation (when people discuss a certain topic and the judgments tend to become more extreme in comparison to their original inclinations) are also prevalent.

Human intuition is able to assign values to the intensity of particular attributes. For example, looking at a person’s wealth, we can categorise them as well-off, affluent, comfortable, wealthy and so on. But without matching values of wealth to categories, the same level of wealth can get interpreted differently and assigned different categories by different people. For instance, someone with 10 million US dollars income per year might be categorised as wealthy, affluent or super-rich by different people. When judging attributes, noise occurs due to the variability of scale units: ‘people might differ in judgement not because they disagree but because they scale differently’ (189).

The authors highlight how the use of simple models (like linear regression, ‘the workhorse of judgement and decision making research’) reduces noise and increases the accuracy of judgments that people usually make (where they consider the information, do mild computation and use their intuition respectively). Research has shown that our satisfaction with personal judgment is an illusion (of validity), and the model of us does better than us, the critical reason being noise in judgments. The argument for mechanical approaches (artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, etc) has been made by studies . However, it is worth considering whether it is feasible for individuals to exercise such models to improve their judgments and decisions (this is an issue on which the authors seem to be silent).

Something that needs some balance is the possible shortcomings of the acknowledgement and removal of noise. This is because reducing noise involves audits and is thus expensive. Strategies introduced to reduce noise might instead create some errors (327) . For instance, if all doctors of a hospital prescribe the same medicine to every patient with the same disease, it will be havoc because physical characteristics vary in individuals (for instance, between an older patient and a young child), therefore they shouldn’t all be treated with the same medicines. Sometimes excessive control imposition to reduce noise can cost people respect and dignity: while individualised processes incur noise, they give people the power to exercise discretion and may encourage morale, creativity and novelty. Such shortcomings have necessitated a trade-off between noise and affordable errors.

Moreover, algorithms and advanced applications can cause prejudiced actions, leading to increased inequality in exercising power. That is because the individuals who design algorithms, and the key stakeholders who legally hold them, will have the discretion to make judgments that favour their interests politically, legally, institutionally and financially.

Gerd Gigerenzer , the exponent of the concept of ecological rationality , also opines that rationality is a relative concept and the use of heuristics doesn’t always lead to bias or noisy decisions. Heuristics are beautiful psychological creations that help us make decisions when the need is instinctive. For instance, when a fielder is going to catch a ball falling from the sky, they are not going to use models to reduce error; nor will they check the probabilities. Their intuitions (about the distance, the degree of the ball’s trajectory to the ground, etc) are the strength they are going to use. Thus, noise is acceptable to some extent when other remedies are not feasible.

Noise is a novel venture of its kind, as it helps readers to realise the processes we undertake in decision-making. Further research on the topic can help to devise mechanisms that can be used for the avoidance of noise and thus encourage more informed and principled decisions.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

About the author

I am a PhD research scholar in the Centre for Economic Studies and Policy at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, India. My primary research interests are market design, information structures and behavioural economics. I can be reached at [email protected].

Book Review: Behavioral Insights by Michael Hallsworth and Elspeth Kirkman

November 24th, 2021, book review: nudge, nudge, think, think: experimenting with ways to change civic behaviour, by peter john et al., june 23rd, 2012.

Noise Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Noise delves into the concept of randomness and talks about how we as humans make decisions that prove to be life-changing, without putting the necessary thought into it, and how we can strengthen our thinking processes.

Favorite quote from the author:

Table of Contents

Video Summary

Noise book summary, noise review, who would i recommend our noise summary to.

Noise is a random mistake in our judgment. The book uses this notion to describe what humans often do without even realizing, and that is making apparently insignificant errors in judgment , which prove to be life-changing in the long run.

By becoming better at spotting our own cognitive biases, our inclination to see the subjective perspective as a universal truth, and always questioning our judgment, we can learn to anticipate mistakes and avoid altering the course of our thinking, our actions, and implicitly our lives for the worse. Therefore, Noise by Daniel Kahneman delves deep into these concepts and teaches us how to strengthen our minds and improve our thinking processes.

Here are my three favorite lessons from the book:

To err is human, therefore we have a natural inclination toward certain biases.
Humans make wrong predictions almost all the time.
The “wisdom-of-crowds” is a real thing if the sample of people is appropriate for the situation.

If you want to fully understand the lessons presented, keep on reading, as I’ll take each of them one by one and analyze them in detail!

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: Our biases can lead to life-altering decisions, so we must learn to spot them to be able to eradicate them .

All humans make mistakes. However, it is the degree and frequency of those mistakes that alter the course of our path and the lives of those around us. Moreover, if we are in powerful positions, such as heads of admission committees, judges, or any other profession that calls for neutrality and a strong mind that can carry cognitive processes almost err-free, we must eliminate the mistakes and biases completely. Ultimately, it’s a moral responsibility and not just a professional one.

Therefore, to do away with biases and errors in the thinking process , you must first learn how to recognize them. A bias is usually used to describe one’s inclination to devalue another human based on personal assumptions. However, a bias is just a systematic error we make in our thinking process, which ultimately alters our judgment. Although it’s not the same as noise, it can lead to it.

The types of biases are many, but let’s take one in particular for example: the conclusion bias. Sometimes, we have a desired outcome in mind and therefore interpret all information in a way favorable to that outcome. Naturally, this affects our judgment and the course of our actions. However, asking yourself questions like: “am I true to myself in the decisions I’m taking?” or “am I being fair by indulging in this action?” can help you question your perspective and get back on the right track.

Lesson 2: Humans are naturally inclined to seek closure and blindly follow a flawed gut when making predictions.

Predictions are more accurate when complex algorithms and high-performance machines make them instead of humans. But that’s not something that may come as a surprise. Still, why is that? In simple words, humans are prone to error and subjectivity, and we’re way too confident in our gut’s ability to make predictions. Our brain seeks answers to questions, closure, and that feeling of “rightness”.

Therefore, we look for convenient answers that make us feel good and give us the closure we’ve been seeking, even though that may not be the right one. A trained mind can get past the initial barriers of noise, such as the conclusion bias , and therefore seek the truth in the matter. Still, what if you truly don’t know the answer? Imagine being a judge who has to decide for the lives of so many people and their families all the time. And being confronted with this huge burden without knowing which is the correct answer. Naturally, their mind gravitates toward finding an answer that feels right and gives them closure.

Studies show that simple algorithms and basic formulas can outperform judges with years of experience when it comes to predicting the correct outcome of a trial and what the criminals will do. Why is that? Due to the noise! Noise can blur our judgment and allow the emotional factor to disturb our rationality. This is how we end up in objective ignorance, which is a state of mind where we’re looking for a satisfying prediction that fulfills our inner desire for closure, rightness, and the answer to a burning question.

Lesson 3: Noise gets canceled by averaging the opinions of people through the wisdom-of-crowds .

You may have or may have not heard of the wisdom-of-crowds, but either way, let me explain this remarkable concept in detail. In a nutshell, it states that although the individual opinions of people on a given matter vary and are sometimes completely opposite from each other, once you average them, the result is most likely the correct answer, or not too far from it, anyways.

So why is that? In simple terms, noise cancels noise. In various studies, averaging the answers of people who were asked the number of beans in a jar, the distance between two cities, or other different questions whatsoever, proved to result in a value extremely close to the truth. However, to make this concept work, we must respect a few rules. First, the subjects must be independent of each other. Their opinions mustn’t be influenced. And the question has to be the same and formulated equally for each participant.

Then, the crowd must be diversified in a way that they don’t share the same bias. If they do, they’ll gravitate towards the same answers, and therefore alter the effect of this concept through a lack of diversity. While the wisdom-of-crowds doesn’t guarantee a solution to the noise in our minds and a sure pathway to the truth, it’s getting us one step closer to finding answers to burning questions and solutions for problems we find hard to fix.

Noise teaches us how to spot errors in our thinking and get rid of the undesired variability in our judgment. Learn to address problems step by step, then find the correct solutions. A worthy read from a Nobel Prize winner!

The 45-year-old soon-to-be judge who wants to strengthen their mind before starting their journey in this field, the 30-year-old person who wants to work on their cognitive biases and understand their judgment mechanism so as to improve it, or the 40-year-old behavioral economist who wants to expand their knowledge in this field by approaching inter-related subjects.

Last Updated on May 6, 2024

While working with my friend Ovi's company SocialBee, I had the good fortune of Maria writing over 200 summaries for us over the course of 18 months. Maria is a professional SEO copywriter, content writer, and social media marketing specialist. When she's not writing or learning more about marketing, she loves to dance and travel all over the world.

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Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Hardcover – May 18 2021

Purchase options and add-ons

Print length 464 pages
Language English
Publisher Little, Brown Spark
Publication date May 18 2021
Dimensions 16.26 x 4.7 x 24.38 cm
ISBN-10 0316451401
ISBN-13 978-0316451406
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown Spark (May 18 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316451401
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316451406
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 658 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.26 x 4.7 x 24.38 cm
#212 in Cognitive Science
#213 in Cognitive Psychology in Professional Science
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About the authors

Cass r. sunstein.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Simpler: The Future of Government and Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter.

Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎, born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.

In 2015 The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by see page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Olivier Sibony

Olivier Sibony is a professor, writer and advisor specializing in the quality of strategic thinking and the design of decision processes. Olivier teaches Strategy, Decision Making and Problem Solving at HEC Paris. He is also an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School in Oxford University.

Before he was a professor, Olivier spent 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France and in the U.S., where he was a Senior Partner. There, he was, at various times, a leader of the Global Strategy Practice and of the Consumer Goods & Retail Sector.

Olivier’s research interests focus on improving the quality of decision-making by reducing the impact of behavioral biases. He is the author of articles in various publications including “Before You Make That Big Decision”, co-authored with Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, which was selected as the cover feature of Harvard Business Review’s book selection of “10 Must-Reads on Making Smart Decisions”. In French, he also authored a book, Réapprendre à Décider.

Olivier builds on this research and on his experience to advise senior leaders on strategic and operational decision-making. He is a frequent keynote speaker and facilitator of senior management and supervisory board meetings. He also serves as a member of corporate, advisory and investment boards.

Olivier Sibony is a graduate of HEC Paris and holds a Ph. D. from Université Paris-Dauphine.

He lives in Paris.

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61 pages • 2 hours read

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

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Summary and Study Guide

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is a 2021 New York Times bestselling nonfiction book that explores the concept of noise or unwanted divergences in decision-making. It is researched and written by Israeli American Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman , American legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein , and French business professor Olivier Sibony . While the authors point out that bias which causes people to make inconsistent discriminations is acknowledged by companies, the problem of noise remains largely invisible and unexamined.

New York Times reviewer Steve Brill has praised the work as a “welcome handbook for making life’s lottery a lot more coherent” (Brill, Steve. “ For a Fairer World, It’s Necessary First to Cut Through the Noise .” The New York Times . 18 May 2021). He adds that the book is highly relevant to the lack of credibility in today’s institutions, writing that “we are living in a moment of rampant polarization and distrust in the fundamental institutions that underpin civil society. Eradicating the noise that leads to random, unfair decisions will help us regain trust in one another.” Thus, Brill believes that the book and the noise-reducing strategies it advocates are accessible and essential.

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The authors argue that noise, or unwanted divergence, is present wherever judgments are being made. Noise can take the form of two individuals in the same profession disagreeing about a proposed course of action. In the area of medical diagnoses, at least one of the disagreeing doctors is wrong, resulting in serious consequences for the patient. In the law, the years a defendant may spend in jail can depend on the severity of the judge rather than the crime.

The authors identify different types of noise, which include level noise , meaning a person’s consistent tendency to act in a certain way; occasion noise , where random external factors such as the weather and the performance of a local sports team could influence a judge’s decision; and pattern noise , where a particular judge has a tendency to act in a particular way when certain situations occur. For example, a typically harsh judge may deviate from their pattern and be especially lenient towards young women. The authors found that pattern noise was the most disruptive of the three types, and that it can only be measured statistically through the examination of multiple cases.

The authors examine different industries including law, medicine, and forensic science, in addition to common situations such as hiring practices and performance evaluations. They look at the typical prevalence of noise in each instance and discuss proven strategies for noise reduction. They find that even where an outcome cannot be easily predicted—for example, how well a candidate will perform in a new role—the process of gathering evidence matters and can reduce error and disagreement. Consistently, the authors found that a balance of being open to new information while not being distracted by seemingly related but irrelevant material was an important criterion in noise-reduction, They also recommend tackling different parts of a decision individually and aggregating the independent opinions of staff. In contrast to business leaders who claimed that intuition was their primary resource, the authors recommend delaying the use of intuition until all other parts of the judging process are complete. This is because intuition is prone to being influenced by noise.

The authors recognize the problems of implementing noise-reduction strategies: They can be time consuming and expensive; they remove initiative for employees and so make their jobs uninspiring and tedious; and worst of all, algorithms used to replace human judgment can augment the worst of human biases against already marginalized groups. However, the authors argue that when noise-reducing strategies fail, it is often because they are not complex enough to suit the requirements of the decision to be made. They add that judgment should be more about accuracy than personal expression and that failure to be precise can contribute to inequities in many areas of life.

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Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Kindle Edition

Print length 465 pages
Language English
Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
Publisher Little, Brown and Company
Publication date May 18, 2021
File size 4250 KB
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ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08KQ2FKBX
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company (May 18, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 18, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 4250 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 465 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0316451398
#19 in Sociology of Social Theory
#27 in Business Decision-Making
#28 in Social Psychology & Interactions

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About the authors

Daniel kahneman.

In 2015 The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by see page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cass R. Sunstein

Olivier Sibony

Olivier Sibony is a graduate of HEC Paris and holds a Ph. D. from Université Paris-Dauphine.

He lives in Paris.

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Noise Summary and Review | Daniel Kahneman

posted on May 20, 2021

A Flaw in Human Judgment

Life gets busy. Has Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment been on your reading list? Learn the key insights now.

We’re scratching the surface here. If you don’t already have Daniel Kahneman’s popular book on psychology, management & leadership, order it here or get the audiobook for free on Amazon to learn the juicy details.

Introduction

When people make decisions, they can rarely avoid errors. Many of them are attributed to our biases, whether we realize it or not. However, one more factor comes into play whenever we form judgments – noise.

Noise forces two doctors to make different decisions when they examine the same patient. Noise is responsible for different sentences passed for the same crime by two independent judges or even the same judge on various occasions. Noise accompanies interviewers when they talk to job applicants. It is because of noise we get different results in situations when they must be identical.

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is an attempt to define noise, reveal its source and ways in which it impacts our decisions. The book also proposes a noise audit that relies on measuring the degree of variability. Along with that, it provides practical advice on how to reduce noise using decision hygiene techniques.

About Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein

Daniel Kahneman is an American-Israeli psychologist, pioneer of behavioral economics, and 2002 Nobel Prize Laureate. Foreign Policy magazine recognized Kahneman among top global thinkers in 2011, and The Economist named him one of the most influential economists in 2015. Kahneman is a professor emeritus at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, as well as a founder of a consulting company TGG Group. His book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) on cognitive biases and errors in decisions became a New York Times Bestseller.

Olivier Sibony is a business consultant and strategy professor holding a Ph.D degree from Paris Sciences et Lettres University. Having spent 25 years as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, he is currently an Affiliate Professor of Strategy at HEC Paris and an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School, Oxford University. Sibony is a co-author of numerous publications such as Harvard Business Review, as well as a book on decision-making traps You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake!

Cass R. Sunstein is a professor at the Robert Walmsley University at Harvard Law School as well as a director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He used to be an Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under President Obama. From 2016 to 2017, he was one of the members of the Defence Innovation Board at the US Department of Defence. Cass Sunstein is an author of many books, articles, and even law reforms. Two of his publications – The World According to Star Wars and Nudge – are highly-acclaimed New York Times bestsellers.

StoryShot #1: Noise vs Bias

The first chapter of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment describes the differences between noise and bias. Noise is unwanted variability in professional judgment. In other words, it represents insufficient consistency in decision-making. Bias, in contrast, is rather an individual’s tendency to use the same patterns of decision-making in similar situations. Bias has consistency but is not able to arrive at the correct result. Despite major dissimilarities between these two concepts, both represent errors in judgments.

The authors uncover a shocking truth – organizations, whether they be public or private, are subject to noise. A study examining 1.5 million court cases discovered that noise often impacts judges’ decisions. Judges tend to pass harsher sentences on days following their local football team losses. In the same vein, they become more lenient when their teams emerge victorious. Evidence shows that sentencing decisions vary substantially for the same crimes. Discrepancies can be observed in the decisions of the same judge, as well as in the decisions of different judges having similar cases.

An example of noise in the private sector can be seen in the way insurance companies determine premium rates. When underwriters assessed risks for the same group of cases, the rates they suggested fluctuate within a dramatic range. Some experts believed that $9500 would be a reasonable rate while the estimates of others showed $16,700 – that’s a 55% difference!

StoryShot #2: Noise Audit

IIf you ask the same insurance company about differences in premium rate estimations before carrying out these estimations, they will say that variability is going to be around 10%. This figure sounds reasonable. However, the factual discrepancy was 55%. The authors call the possibility of measuring variabilities a noise audit.

Again, if you ask a judge if he/she expects the same decision from another experienced judge, the answer is going to be “pretty much the same.” In reality, variabilities are vastly greater than people expect them to be.

The authors recognize two types of noise. Occasional noise happens when factors such as a football team’s performance or part of the day impact decisions of a person or a group on various occasions. A noise audit is able to recognize this type and help tackle it. Another type – system noise – describes unwanted variabilities that occur when a group of experts tries to individually assess the same events. This type of noise is harder to deal with. It requires greater “decision hygiene”, i.e. noise reduction methods.

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Adultery Gets Weird in Miranda July’s New Novel

An anxious artist’s road trip stops short for a torrid affair at a tired motel. In “All Fours,” the desire for change is familiar. How to satisfy it isn’t.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

ALL FOURS, by Miranda July

Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing feared flying , but womanned up to attend the first psychoanalytic conference in Vienna since the Holocaust. Fifty years later , the unnamed heroine of Miranda July’s new novel, “All Fours” — let’s call her Amanda Huggenkiss — can barely begin a cross-country road trip.

Huggenkiss — aah, never mind — the anonymous narrator is five years from 50 herself: a “semi-famous” artist with a desk that’s a little wobbly and a career to match. “I worked in so many mediums that I was able to debut many times,” she recounts. “I just kept emerging, like a bud opening over and over again.”

She’s married to a music producer, Harris, who divides people up not into hedgehogs and foxes but Drivers and Parkers. The former, like himself, are functional and content. The latter, like his wife, are bored by ordinary life but, craving applause, thrive in tight spots and emergencies.

One was the birth of their baby, Sam (a nonbinary “ theyby ”), after the kind of fetal-maternal hemorrhage that often results in stillbirth. Mrs. Harris is ecstatic about her child, now a second grader — taking weekly candlelit baths with them, she weeps with love — but she feels her parenting efforts, which include massaging kale for a five-part bento box lunch, go underrecognized or criticized. And her sex life, which is dependent on fantasy, a.k.a. “mind-rooted,” has suffered. Sometimes when she delays initiating, she can hear her body-rooted husband’s penis “whistling impatiently like a teakettle.”

After a whiskey company unexpectedly licenses one of her saucy sentences for $20,000, she decides to splurge for her birthday on a room at the Carlyle, the fancy-pants hotel on New York’s Upper East Side. But, starting from Los Angeles, she only makes it as far as a motel in the nearby suburb of Monrovia. And that’s when things get weird in that Miranda July way that some critics find the ne plus ultra of twee (Harris twee?) and I happen to enjoy very much, with a few caveats.

Angst about the change of life — what Jong would call “ Fear of Fifty ” — seems a family curse. At 55, the narrator’s paternal grandmother had fatally flung herself out the window, first considerately placing herself in a garbage bag; an Aunt Ruthie followed; and her own mother is cognitively impaired and hard of hearing (while her father perpetually occupies a “deathfield” of depression and panic). But she is most immediately concerned with losing her looks and libido: of falling off, what she sees on a graph of shifting hormones over a life span, the “estrogen cliff.”

She blows her windfall to redo Room 321 in lavish and idiosyncratic style, carpeted in New Zealand wool and scented with tonka beans, then begins a torrid and all-consuming romance with the decorator’s husband, a hip-hop hobbyist named Davey who works at Hertz and resembles Gilbert Blythe from the “Anne of Green Gables” series. (Blythe and a Grand Parterre Sarouk carpet are the kinds of allusions July drops for her cultivated audience without explanation.)

A few words about the sex in “All Fours,” which is titled for what the narrator’s best friend, a sculptor, calls “the most stable position. Like a table.” (Well, not a wobbly one.) It is gaspingly graphic, sometimes verging on gross (urine, tampons and a suspected polyp — “hopefully benign”— all come into play), and supplemented with masturbation galore. Compelled to read these definitely not twee-rated passages, I briefly considered filing a complaint with human resources. Then I remembered the protracted and messy sex scenes released with such fanfare into the culture by Philip Roth, Harold Brodkey, et al., and decided I was being discriminatory and prudish.

Jong popularized the idea of “zipless” intercourse (more snappily than that); July’s term is “bottomless.” Her perimenopausal protagonist’s desire is insatiable, unfathomable, roving across genders and generations: a kind of supernova of lust preceding what she anticipates will be the black hole of senescence.

Even more than this adulterous appetite, her casual ageism, in a milieu where preferred pronouns are sacred, can shock. “Nobody except the doctor knew — or could even conceive of — what was going on between her legs,” she thinks of a woman in her 70s glimpsed in the gynecologist’s office, imagining “gray labia, long and loose.” ( Paging Arnold Kegel !) And, buying a 1920s bedspread from a “free spirit” at an antique mall: “Sometimes my hatred of older women almost knocked me over, it came so abruptly.”

Hatred is fear-based, of course — and you come to understand that the main character’s real journey will not be on Route 66, but the path to self-acceptance. In order to ride shotgun comfortably, though, you have to accept her preoccupation with the reflection in the rearview mirror; her indifference to any current affairs but her own.

When this unnamed She spray-paints “CALL ME” on a chair for the now-estranged Davey, it’s like John Cusack’s boombox serenade in “Say Anything.” When she posts a wild dance on Instagram after firming her own body at the gym, frantically seeking his Like, it’s like the boombox turned up to arena volume.

Are the mental-health professionals back from Europe yet? One pops up late on Harris’s arm, as the marriage reconfigures, but otherwise they’re strangely absent from “All Fours,” whose woman on the verge of chronological maturity has the intense focus of an artist, sure — but also a yearning adolescent.

ALL FOURS | By Miranda July | Riverhead | 336 pp. | $29

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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A 19th-century bookbinder struggles with race and identity in 'the library thief'.

Keishel Williams

The examination of race and identity can be seen throughout literature, and increasingly today.

In her debut novel, The Library Thief , Kuchenga Shenjé explores these concepts — and the associated expectations that arise when society demands that every group be neatly categorized. Shenjé delves into the past in this work of historical fiction, posing inquiries about Black people's lives in the Victorian era.

In this 19th-century English story, Florence, an ambitious bookbinder, is expelled from her family home by her harsh and unforgiving father for being with a young man. Florence, a clever and savvy woman, persuades Lord Francis Belfield to let her stay at Rose Hall manor by promising to restore the priceless books in his library in time for an impending sale, assuring him that she is just as skilled as her father. Among Lord Belfield's minimal staff, Florence stands out as an educated, liberal woman.

But Florence is not as polished as she wants her new acquaintances to believe. Being raised by a single father and not knowing her mother, whom she was told is dead, has fostered an emptiness in Florence she thought she could fill with books. She's adrift and feels unloved. This fragile foundation is fertile ground for the harrowing experiences Florence faces during her stay at the manor.

Florence arrives at Rose Hall to find that Lord Banfeild's wife has died, and the new widower is beside himself with grief. Immediately, Florence finds herself in the middle of a tightly woven plot of family secrets and lies that conveniently shroud the lives of the upper class. She becomes fixated on Lady Persephone's death and starts investigating suspicious activities around it. During her investigation, she uncovers some dark Banfield family secrets, which include violence, abuse, and "passing" family members. This journey of discovery forces Florence to confront her own identity and the mysteries surrounding her life.

Some characters in this novel intentionally or unintentionally pass as white because they find it easier than living as a Black person in Victorian England. While the topic of "passing" is frequently explored in literature set in the 1920s and 30s, Shenjé delves into what it means to be a Black person passing in the 19th century. She explores this theme in multiple ways: One character completely abandons their family to live as a white man, another maintains contact with her family but uses her husband's wealth and influence to hide in plain sight, and the third, and perhaps most intriguing, character lives as a white person without knowing they were actually Black.

Florence is uncertain about her own race, and she passionately advocates for the rights of Black people. She often becomes offended by the viewpoints of her friends, neighbors, and even their pastor towards Black people. Florence grew up in a white community and had limited interactions with Black people, other than through books until she met Lady Persephone's lady's maid — a beautiful, charming, and highly educated Black woman. "How could a whole sector of humanity once viewed as animals now be writing books and teaching universities and the like? We had been lied to," she says after a particularly awful sermon propagating the inferiority of African people.

At times, Shenjé's use of language attempting at inclusivity fails to achieve what appears to be the intended effect. The discussion of gender roles in a highly complex way seems forced and unrealistic. This is especially so when such language and philosophizing are attributed to certain characters in particular.

While The Library Thief doesn't exactly break new ground when it comes to exploring issues of race and identity, it does have some entertaining elements. Wesley is a standout character who should have received more attention. If a movie adaptation of the character were ever to happen, Patrick Walshe McBride would be an excellent choice to play the part. Shenjé also did an fantastic job planting hints throughout the story that lead to the main character's true identity. The best part of the book is the unexpected twist at the end that ties up the murder mystery. Kudos to Shenjé for that surprise ending.

Keishel Williams is a Trinidadian American book reviewer, arts & culture writer, and editor.

Amazon’s Screening of Reviews Sparks Discussion Amid Kristi Noem’s Book Controversy

S outh Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s new book “No Going Back” has generated a firestorm of criticism, leading to an unusual response from Amazon: the e-commerce giant has restricted user reviews on the product due to “unusual reviewing activity”. The measure was taken after a highly-discussed excerpt was released where Noem writes about killing her dog, causing the online marketplace to limit reviews to those made by verified purchasers.

“We want Amazon customers to shop with confidence knowing that the reviews they see are authentic and trustworthy,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “If we notice unusual reviewing activity, we will occasionally limit reviews to verified purchases only.” This statement came amidst widespread scrutiny of Noem’s account of killing her 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket two decades ago, an act she defended as a necessary measure taken on a farm for the safety of her family.

The decision to screen reviews is a rare move for Amazon but highlights the contentious nature of Noem’s book, which, as of the time the reports were written, scored only one star on Amazon. It signals the platform’s effort to maintain the integrity of its review system against a potential flood of emotionally charged feedback, particularly when a public figure is involved.

Noem’s memoir, which details her conservative rise in American politics and her vision for the country, does not shy away from controversy. Besides the contentious story of her dog, Noem has found herself in the crosshairs of political debate and media attention, which has only intensified with the release of her book. Despite the backlash, Noem has remained resolute in her defense, even amid discussions suggesting that the controversy may affect her political future, including speculations about a vice-presidential candidacy alongside former President Donald Trump. According to sources, Noem had already been “cast aside” from Trump’s potential running mate list even before the dog story came to light.

Noem took to social media to respond to the outcry, stating, “We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.” In further defense of her actions, she emphasized, “I made a decision as a mom, and I’m a grandma, that the safety of my children and safety of people was what I needed to decide, protecting them from a very dangerous animal.”

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– Amazon Kills Mean Reviews of Kristi Noem’s Book , The Daily Beast, 05/09/2024

– Amazon restricts reviews on Kristi Noem’s controversial book citing ‘unusual activity’ , The Independent, 05/08/2024

– Amazon restricts reviews on Kristi Noem’s controversial book citing ‘unusual activity’ , Yahoo News Canada, 05/06/2024

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s new book “No Going Back” has generated a firestorm of criticism, leading to an unusual response from Amazon: the e-commerce giant has restricted user reviews on the product due to “unusual reviewing activity”. The measure was taken after a highly-discussed excerpt was released where Noem writes about killing her dog, […]

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Review: Huawei Freebuds Pro 3 Wireless In-Ear Headphones

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“Tricky” is to understate Huawei’s position in much of the world outside its native China more than somewhat. Few are the electronics companies that are the subject of sanction by nation-states, and fewer still are the entities that could cause the US Democratic Party to support one of the executive orders Donald Trump issued when he was president. Things have been tricky (for want of a better word) for Huawei on the world stage for more than four years now, and they show no sign of getting any easier any time soon.

The company will not go gentle into that good night, though. Its aspirations for domination of the world’s smartphone market are being recalibrated, sure, but in other areas of consumer electronics it’s as ambitious as it ever was. These new Freebuds Pro 3 true wireless in-ear headphones are just the latest case in point.

I suppose that when you’ve gone toe-to-toe with the national security departments of entire countries, picking fights with Apple, Bose, and Sony doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal. Nevertheless, the Freebuds Pro 3 asking price ($219, £179) puts them up against alternatives of widely acknowledged excellence.

Why, then, would you choose a pair of these when you could spend money on a rival product that almost certainly won’t get you put on a shadowy watchlist of possible enemies of the state?

Huawei FreeBuds Pro inside charging case

Huawei's new buds have a compact, comfortable (and familiar) form factor.

Well, for starters, you might be a fan of shiny things. The Freebuds Pro 3 are available in three finishes—frost silver, ceramic white, and, um, green—and the earbuds themselves are about as highly polished (and, consequently, slippery) as these things ever get.

The little pebble-shaped charging case they travel in, made of nano glass with some mirrored branding on its rear, is notably resistant to marking or scratching, and has a concealed hinge that contributes to a quite sleek, upmarket look and feel.

Or you might love a bit of hyperbolic language. The claims Huawei is making for the technical specification of the Freebuds Pro 3 are all easily proven, but the company is not shy of dressing up what’s straightforwardly impressive in some quite flowery language. For instance, it’s apparently not enough to explain that each earbud has an 11-mm full-range dynamic driver augmented by a planar diaphragm and Halbach array—no, for Huawei’s purposes it’s an “ultra-hearing dual driver.” For those ultra-hearers among us, presumably.

The Freebuds Pro's charging case has a sleek, upmarket look and feel.

Elsewhere, the Freebuds Pro 3 are generally competitive where specification is concerned. Battery life of up to 31 hours (including the charging case) is just about acceptable, and you’ve a choice of wired or wireless charging when those 31 hours are up.

There’s three-stage active noise cancellation consisting of “off,” “awareness,” and “on”—and within “on” you’ve a choice of four stages of intensity. Wireless connectivity is dual-point via Bluetooth 5.2, and there’s support for SBC and AAC codecs along with high-resolution LDAC and L2HC 2.0 alternatives (although given that this last is exclusive to Huawei smartphones, its availability is more restricted than Huawei would probably like).

Each earbud has three silicon mics plus a bone-conduction mic to take care of active noise cancellation and telephony and voice control, and the earbuds are IP54-rated against dust and moisture.

Control is available via pinch or swipe gestures on the earbud stems. Rather strangely, though, the relevant surface is at the front, rather than the side, of each stem, which makes using them feel unnatural and awkward.

There’s also the clean, comprehensive, and remarkably nosy AI Life control app. Huawei’s relationship with Google being what it is, though, Android users will find it slightly more of a faff to obtain than any other app they’ve ever been interested in. Its half-dozen EQ presets plus 10-band equalizer are particularly useful for exploring the sonic boundaries of the Freebuds Pro 3, though.

And to be fair, those sonic boundaries are quite distant. When it comes to the sort of stuff you like to listen to, the Huawei are fairly agnostic and have a pretty big comfort zone. During the course of this test, music ranged from Funkadelic’s “I Wanna Know if It’s Good to You” as a 16-bit/44.1-kHz FLAC file to a 24-bit/96-kHz file of “Wish You Were Gay” by Billie Eilish via a 320-kbps stream of The Boy With The Arab Strap by Belle and Sebastian—and the Freebuds Pro 3 play no favorites. They seem prepared to make the best of any situation in which they find themselves.

With the EQ settings in the control app left at “Default (Huawei Sound),” there’s a very pleasant balance to the overall presentation. Low frequencies are deep and nicely textured, acceptably detailed, and properly varied when it comes to tone and timbre.

They communicate quite freely through the midrange, so no matter if it’s the massed voices of Funkadelic, the narcoleptic indie stylings of Belle and Sebastian, or the close-mic’d confessional of Billie Eilish, there’s positivity and no shortage of character to voices.

At the top end, the sound bites politely, with just about enough substance to balance out the brilliance of the treble action. Here, too, the Huawei keep detail levels high, and have enough harmonic variation available to prevent any sensation of uniformity.

The Freebuds Pro 3s seem prepared to try and make the best of any sonic situation.

The soundstage the Freebuds Pro 3 create is acceptably spacious and properly controlled, so even the chaos of the Funkadelic recording has a bit of discipline and separation. There’s a fair amount of dynamic headroom available, too, which means the changes in intensity apparent in each recording are described faithfully.

And the consistency of the overall tonality here, which is balanced and naturalistic, combines with an even-handed approach to the frequency range to create a convincing sensation of unity and singularity to even the most mashed up cut-and-paste recordings.

However, they’re an altogether more qualified success when it comes to active noise cancellation. Despite the relative amount of adjustability available in the control app, the Freebuds Pro 3 never quite summon the ability to do a complete job on external distractions. So reduction is what you can expect, rather than cancellation.

Those listeners who are familiar with the uncanny powers of noise cancellation available from, say, an equivalent pair of Bose true wireless earbuds will have to manage their expectations more than somewhat. At least the Huawei don’t alter their sonic characteristics depending on whether ANC is engaged or not, which is more than can be said for a fair few of their nominal rivals.

Nominal rivals, though, probably constitute the biggest problem the Huawei Freebuds Pro 3 face. This is a cutthroat market right now, and while there’s a lot to be said for the way these earbuds sound, and while their compact shininess is not without appeal, being pretty good is never going to be good enough.

A Black conservative reflects on his past, shocking behavior and all

In “Late Admissions,” the economist, social critic and podcast host Glenn Loury recounts his eminent career and his ideological journeys.

About a month ago, before the publication of his disarmingly candid new memoir, “ Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative ,” Glenn Loury — the eminent economist and social critic — announced he was undergoing a major surgery. “I have got spinal stenosis with a vengeance,” he told followers of “The Glenn Show,” his popular weekly video podcast. Thankfully, Loury’s ailment is not life-threatening, but at 75 and on the cusp of retirement, he is in the twilight of a distinguished and often contentious career, and “Late Admissions” is certain to impact his legacy.

“I am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them,” Loury warns early in the book. Fans of “The Glenn Show” admire Loury’s probing intelligence and forceful charisma. But he has many detractors, too. He was arrested twice in 1987, first for assaulting his girlfriend, then for drugs. Though the assault charge was dropped, it was a terrible look for someone who was up for a job in the Reagan administration at the time. More recently, Loury has drawn criticism for inveighing strongly, and occasionally profanely, against America’s post-George Floyd “racial reckoning.”

In “Late Admissions,” he intertwines his intellectual journey with unexpectedly juicy personal disclosures. By confessing to some reprehensible behavior, Loury says, he hopes to earn his readers’ trust and, paradoxically, their respect and admiration. If this seems like a risky gambit for such a polarizing thinker, you are onto something.

Loury was born and raised in Park Manor, a Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Socioeconomically, most of its law-abiding residents cruised at medium altitude, but some descended into the underground economy. Loury warmly portrays his vexing and often amusing extended family. His Aunt Eloise became his primary caregiver. Generous, decorous and churchgoing, Eloise enjoyed standing in her community. She had two beguiling brothers, however. Loury’s Uncle Adlert was brilliant but erratic; he became a successful lawyer back when that was uncommon among Black men, only to be disbarred over some unspecified “shady family business.” Meanwhile, Uncle Alfred fathered an astonishing 22 children by four women. “Alfred’s appetites may have outstripped the confines of respectability,” Loury acknowledges. “But he was quite the patriarch. His sense of duty as a father, stretched thin though it may have been, gave his life meaning.”

Loury finished high school “both a valedictorian and a virgin,” though he had two kids by the time he was 19. It was the beginning of a lifetime of assiduously wooing women. While attending junior college, Loury worked as a clerk in a printing plant. It was a solid entry-level job for a young man, and he seemed destined to work a 9 to 5, until an instructor recognized his potential.

Loury transferred on a scholarship to Northwestern University, where he was swiftly discovered to be a math prodigy. In 1972, at 23, he started working on his PhD in economics at MIT. “I am coming in hot,” Loury reminiscences about his arrival on campus. “I’m about to begin a steep professional and intellectual ascent. I know this, and I’m excited by the thought.” As a young man, he published blockbuster works in technical economic theory, and in 1982 he became the first Black economist to earn tenure at Harvard. That is where his path to academic stardom stalled.

Loury faced a conundrum. Was he building a career as an economist, or as a Black economist? It did not help that liberal intellectuals tended not to appreciate his social critiques. Loury surmised that, given American history, it was probably unwise for disadvantaged African Americans to rely upon Whites to help them. Instead, he thought that Black people should follow his Uncle Moonie’s common-sense formula for poverty relief: “Get up and get busy.” Loury recalls a senior colleague warning him to be “very, very careful” about saying this publicly, for fear he could be labeled “conservative” and therefore on the “wrong side” of the early-1980s inequality debate.

Meanwhile, Loury’s ideas in his primary field started drying up. “I began to doubt I had what it takes to be a Player in the big league economics game,” he writes. Many academics suffer from “impostor syndrome,” but Loury actually became one: In the evenings, he would drive his late-model Saab into Boston’s Black neighborhoods, turn his baseball cap sideways (it was the ’80s, remember) and engage in tawdry high jinks. When he trawled nightclubs, hired prostitutes and smoked crack — to which he became powerfully addicted — nobody in those circles knew that he was an Ivy League professor by day. Likewise, his Harvard colleagues had no idea that Loury was paying the rent on a “love nest” for his barely-out-of-college mistress, after having been delinquent on payments for student loans and child support.

Even after his double life was discovered and made national news, Loury could not stop smoking crack. Several of his book’s passages recounting his self-sabotaging escapades induced queasiness in this reader.

Loury’s addiction eventually landed him at the Appleton clinic, an inpatient program at the storied McLean Psychiatric Hospital. After spending several weeks there, he moved into a halfway house and attended daily AA meetings, which may be where he grew comfortable sharing the types of unflattering self-disclosures that appear throughout his memoir. In 1989, Loury and his wife became born-again Christians and found solace and community in a Black church, though only temporarily. Regarding the divinity of Christ, Loury says, “I now have my doubts.”

Upon resuming his career in the early 1990s, Loury continued to surprise, criticizing some erstwhile intellectual allies: He mocked Charles Murray, co-author of “The Bell Curve,” for dodging his critics and for his perceived lack of technical facility. He found Dinesh D’Souza’s “The End of Racism” pathetic, dishonest and contemptuous of Black people. Loury had been friends with Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, vocal opponents of affirmative action, but in 1996, at a backyard barbecue, an argument he had with the couple about the urban crisis grew very heated. The following year, Loury eviscerated their tremendously hyped co-written opus, “America in Black and White,” at length in the Atlantic.

Some were correct to wonder: Was Loury becoming progressive? His next research topic was mass incarceration, and back then “there was no blacker project than criticizing America’s prisons,” Loury writes. He found a role that suited his talents, delivering fiery sermons on the United States’ “moral decrepitude.” Though he enjoyed the rush that came from speaking before validating crowds, he eventually concluded that the New Jim Crow narrative — the idea that prisons could be likened to a racial caste system — was “wildly overstated.” He likewise could not get behind the Black Lives Matter movement, which started garnering headlines in 2014. “I had to acknowledge that my social critique and my disposition were better suited to the right,” he writes. “I was a conservative, and in truth I suspected that’s what I always had been.”

A poignant moment arrives toward the end of “Late Admissions.” Glenn’s second wife, Linda, had just died from cancer, at 59. Going through her possessions, he found a self-help book. “It was about learning how to forgive those who have wronged you,” he writes. Many of its passages were underlined, and Loury did not have to wonder why.

So, does Loury’s delicate gambit — his attempt to garner sympathy while revealing some of his worst behavior — work? For this reader, the answer is unequivocally yes. “Late Admissions” is a zestfully written book, packed with humor, pathos and hard-earned wisdom. Even its distasteful revelations are, for the most part, in keeping with Loury’s rigorous ethic of self-scrutiny. He has long insisted that when social science professors play to the crowds or are too timid to speak the truth as they see it, they dishonor their vocation. Now he’s applied that spirt to his autobiography. Loury’s body may be showing the signs of age, but his famously independent thinking is as strong as ever.

John McMillian is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. He is writing a book about crime and policing in New York City since the 1960s .

Late Admissions

Confessions of a Black Conservative

By Glenn C. Loury

W.W. Norton. 428 pp. $32.50

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Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein review
One of Noise's most repeated recommendations for noise reduction (and there is a lot of repetition in this book) is that judgments should, where possible, make use of the "wisdom of the crowd ...
For a Fairer World, It's Necessary First to Cut Through the 'Noise
In their new book, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein address the necessity of "noise reduction," eliminating the randomness that enters decision making of all sorts.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein. 3.66. 12,902 ratings1,425 reviews. From the bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the co-author of Nudge, a groundbreaking exploration of why most people make bad judgments, and how to control for that noise. Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to ...
Book review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman
This undesirable variability in professional judgment is an example of noise, the ubiquitous and often-ignored human failing that is the focus of this well-researched, convincing and practical book.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is a nonfiction book by professors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein.It was first published on May 18, 2021. The book concerns 'noise' in human judgment and decision-making.The authors define noise in human judgment as "undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem" and focus on the statistical properties and psychological perspectives ...
NOISE
Noise is especially prevalent in psychiatry, they add, where subjective opinion is more pronounced than in other disciplines. A cousin of bias, noise is difficult to isolate and correct. In forensic science, the authors write, noise is implicated in nearly half of all misidentifications of perpetrators and wrongful imprisonments.
Book Review: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman
In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein explore how 'noise' affects human judgment and reflect on what we can do to address this.This novel book will help readers to better understand the processes we undertake in decision-making and how to encourage more informed and principled decisions, writes Kaibalyapati Mishra.
Book Review: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman
In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein explore how 'noise' affects human judgment and reflect on what we can do to address this. This novel book will help readers to better understand the processes we undertake in decision-making and how to encourage more informed and principled decisions, writes Kaibalyapati Mishra.
Noise
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'A monumental, gripping book ... Outstanding' SUNDAY TIMES 'Noise may be the most important book I've read in more than a decade. A genuinely new idea so exceedingly important you will immediately put it into practice. A masterpiece' Angela Duckworth, author of Grit 'An absolutely brilliant investigation of a massive societal problem that has been hiding ...
Noise : A Flaw in Human Judgment
These are examples of noise: variability in judgements that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein show how noise produces errors in many fields, including in medicine, law, public health, economic forecasting, forensic science, child protection, creative strategy, performance review and hiring.
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
The authors identify two prevailing problems in human judgments decisions. The first is bias and the second is noise. Bias is a subject that is covered in great depth and detail in Daniel Kahneman's (one of the three authors of this book under review) book, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' (2013 Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection ...
Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein
These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise , Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection.
Noise Summary (Daniel Kahneman)
Noise Summary. 1-Sentence-Summary: Noise delves into the concept of randomness and talks about how we as humans make decisions that prove to be life-changing, without putting the necessary thought into it, and how we can strengthen our thinking processes. Read in: 4 minutes. Favorite quote from the author:
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Hardcover
These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection ...
Book Marks reviews of Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and
This is disappointing given the authors' previous output and it's tempting to wonder the extent to which this study was a product less of an idea whose time had come than of a publisher's desire for the next bestseller. Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein has an overall rating of Mixed based on 7 book reviews.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment|Paperback
These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection ...
Noise Summary and Study Guide
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is a 2021 New York Times bestselling nonfiction book that explores the concept of noise or unwanted divergences in decision-making. It is researched and written by Israeli American Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman, American legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, and French business professor Olivier Sibony.
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Kindle Edition
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment - Kindle edition by Kahneman, Daniel, Sibony, Olivier, Sunstein, Cass R.. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment.
BOOK REVIEW Noise: A Flaw in covers reviews of current Human Judgment
The book Noise is about errors in human judgment, which the authors have separated into two categories: bias and noise. Bias refers to systematic deviations from ideal human behaviours that ... BOOK REVIEW covers reviews of current books on management. 164 BOOK REVIEW hand, it is rarely acknowledged in public discussions ...
Noise Summary and Review
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment is an attempt to define noise, reveal its source and ways in which it impacts our decisions. The book also proposes a noise audit that relies on measuring the degree of variability. Along with that, it provides practical advice on how to reduce noise using decision hygiene techniques.
'A Book of Noises' and 'Listen' explore why sound gets under our skin
Books Book Reviews Fiction Nonfiction May books 50 notable fiction books. ... The first is the noise, noise, noise issued by the jing-tinglers, floo-floobers and tar-tinkers that the Hoo girls and ...
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Don DeLillo's book "White Noise," newly adapted for the screen by Noah Baumbach, precisely diagnosed the modern condition, Dana Spiotta writes.
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Kuchenga Shenjé's 'The Library Thief' book review : NPR
The best part of the book is the unexpected twist at the end that ties up the murder mystery. Kudos to Shenjé for that surprise ending. Keishel Williams is a Trinidadian American book reviewer ...
Amazon's Screening of Reviews Sparks Discussion Amid Kristi Noem's Book
The decision to screen reviews is a rare move for Amazon but highlights the contentious nature of Noem's book, which, as of the time the reports were written, scored only one star on Amazon.
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It was so cold on the night of Jan. 27, 1986, that officials at Florida's Kennedy Space Center feared the water pipes on the space shuttle launchpad would freeze. To protect the plumbing, they ...
Huawei Freebuds Pro 3 Review: Great Sound, Poor Noise Canceling
Huawei Freebuds Pro 3. Rating: 7/10. £179 at Amazon (UK) $219 at Huawei. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more ...
Review
Review by John McMillian. May 10, 2024 at 11:50 a.m. EDT. (W.W. Norton) 8 min. About a month ago, before the publication of his disarmingly candid new memoir, " Late Admissions: Confessions of a ...

Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein review – the price of poor judgment

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Lesson 1: Our biases can lead to life-altering decisions, so we must learn to spot them to be able to eradicate them .

Lesson 2: Humans are naturally inclined to seek closure and blindly follow a flawed gut when making predictions.

Lesson 3: Noise gets canceled by averaging the opinions of people through the wisdom-of-crowds .

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