One of my all-time favourite books is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. So you can guess that I was eager to read his new book Noise.
It examines how you can improve human judgement. If you didn't know Daniel popularised the concept of cognitive biases in 1972. The story is shared in another great book, The Undoing Project.
In professional judgments of all kinds, whenever accuracy is the goal, bias and noise play the same role in the calculation of overall error. In some cases, the larger contributor will be bias; in other cases, it will be noise (and these cases are more common than one might expect).
A common scenario in organisations is recruitment. If employers rely on only one job interview to pick a candidate from among a similarly qualified group, the chances that this candidate will indeed perform better than the others are about 56% to 61%. This means our chances of picking the right candidate for the job are small. We could almost be as successful flipping a coin rather than doing interviews.
You can read the full summary here
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