Book Review: "Noise" by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein

I recently read the book Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. I will refer to it as the current book, because it was written after the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman (one of the authors of the current book); I will refer to the latter book as the previous book because many concepts from the previous book are briefly reviewed in the current book, and as I reviewed the previous book in the post just before this one on this blog [LINK], I will sometimes compare some aspects of the current book to the previous book.

The current book introduces the concepts of statistical noise & statistical bias in human judgments, discusses the psychological biases that can lead to statistical biases & noise (of which statistical noise can be clearly seen even in the absence of clear information about statistical biases), demonstrates how statistical noise can lead to uncontrolled & large variations in human judgments in fields like criminal justice, medicine, forensic science, insurance claims adjustment, corporate hiring, and college admissions, explains the sorts of systematic techniques at individual & organizational levels that can be used to reduce noise in judgments, and discusses some tradeoffs that may be encountered when implementing these noise reduction strategies. The authors' discussion of many of the psychological biases that lead to statistical noise in judgments reviews concepts from the previous book, especially Systems 1 & 2.

When reading the current book, I found myself generally agreeing with the discussions of techniques to reduce noise in domains where the presence of significant statistical noise in judgments is broadly recognized as a severe problem. These techniques include aggregating predictions or evaluations that are made independently, structuring/sequencing discussions among people judging things so that their decisions don't affect each other through emergent group-based social dynamics, carefully accounting for base rates from external information when assessing various internal probabilities, and breaking up decision processes into smaller steps that are more clearly defined in their intent and in example decisions/anchors. It helped a lot that I had read the previous book first, such that even if I didn't remember every detail of every psychological bias presented in both the previous book and the current book, those things looked familiar upon reading them in the current book.

There were also a few new things that I learned from the current book. I learned about how the process of judgment feels so satisfying and infuses confidence into the person making the judgment specifically from the psychological signal of having completed the judgment, which explains why so many people who make professional judgments in many domains are so reluctant to turn their discretion over to more systematic rules or algorithms. I also learned about how simple models of human predictive judgments, when those predictive judgments are about specific outcomes, may do a better job at predicting the outcomes that are the objects of judgment than at predicting the judgments that humans would make, simply because those models lack within-person noise pervasive in human judgments.

However, my overall opinion of the current book was shaped more by the many major and minor (the latter to an appropriately lesser extent) criticisms of it. These minor and major criticisms as well as my concluding remarks will be presented in separate sections as follows after the jump; the spoiling of my concluding remarks is simply that I do not recommend this book to others.

Sexual Harassment, Power Dynamics, and Institutions

I've been thinking (read: armchair philosophizing without necessarily going into much depth) lately a bit about the notion of individuals shaping the interactions they have with other people versus the other way around, and the related notion of how individuals shape institutions versus the other way around. This idea has stuck in my mind especially in the context of sexual harassment committed by a professor against a student in my department (for a broad overview, see this article by Alanna Vagianos in HuffPost, and for a more detailed account, see this article by Allie Spensley in The Daily Princetonian; disclaimer: I know the student but not the professor), because of the complicated way that power imbalances between faculty and students intertwine with institutional tensions at large research universities like Princeton University. Follow the jump to see more blather from me about this.

Book Review: "All the President's Men" by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward

I recently got to read All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward; although I had seen the movie many years ago, I hadn't gotten the opportunity to read the book until now, and I figured that with the current political situation in the US which so many are calling "Nixonian", it would be good to revisit one of the definitive works about a pivotal political scandal in that era. It's a documentation, from the perspective of the Washington Post reporters (the authors of the book), of the events and investigative journalism starting from the reports of the Watergate Hotel burglary and ensuing arrests all the way to the implication of President Richard Nixon and his top aides in engaging in illegal dirty campaign tactics to harm political enemies and subsequent illegal coverup tactics. It's a moderately long book, yet the smooth writing and structure of the details keep the narrative moving quickly. Although it has been a while, from what I remember, the movie focuses more on Bob Woodward's meetings with Deep Throat (the deep background informant who worked for the government), so it was nice for me to see the fuller picture of events from many other angles, showing that the meetings with Deep Throat, while important, were not necessarily the primary focus of any reporting events.

From the standpoint of this being a documentation of historical events, more than anything else, I was fascinated to see the (usually clever, sometimes questionable) extent to which reporters like Woodward and Bernstein would cajole agreements to meet and then share information on the phone, in person, or in writing with various people; it was like a miniature course in human psychology in the framework of various competing institutions with different power structures, and this was evident not just in the conduct of the interview subjects but also in Woodward and Bernstein themselves. That said, there were a few instances were their conduct went beyond the point of being questionable, becoming sleazy or even straddling the line of legality, and while these instances were discussed, they weren't given the same gravity as the corrupt behavior of government officials that they were uncovering; from their perspective, it makes sense as they would of course cast themselves in their own story as sympathetic protagonist reporters going up against a corrupt and vile group of people in a powerful institutions, but I would have liked to see more of this (though maybe other accounts from this era from other reporters would go further in depth). Overall, I really enjoyed reading this, and would recommend this to anyone interested in the political situation then or now. Follow the jump to see a few more brief thoughts about this book in the context of the current political situation in the US.

"Judge Sonia, I Just Met a Judge named Judge Sonia" - Jon Stewart

Yes, that quote is from Jon Stewart from a recent The Daily Show episode. Jon Stewart is godly.

So one of the big news items of this week is Sonia Sotomayor's successful confirmation hearing and confirmation. I got a few things from both sides of the Senate aisle when hearing about the sessions.
It seems like Sotomayor is an eminently qualified judge on her own merits; she has exercised good judgment in interpreting the law for almost all cases, and she seems to be fairly moderate and not consistently judge according to one ideology.
I thought that the Republicans trying to paint her as a left-wing activist judge was rather unfair. That said, any judge who is not as ridiculously conservative as the current Republican party is automatically labeled like her. Furthermore, she has exercised remarkable restraint in general, especially so compared to the right-wing's own judicial hero, Antonin Scalia.
Also, their attempt to bring her down with her "wise Latina" comment was futile. Though her choice of words was rather poor in that it implied bias towards nonwhites rather than the idea that everyone invariably brings their own experiences to the table. This also tied in with President Obama's praise of her "empathy", which Republicans somehow mistook for "sympathy [to Democrats]". They also tried to play the victim by portraying the white American experience as the neutral background upon which all others should be judged, which all combined to portray them as a party of threatened old WASP males. Thankfully, this backfired and didn't affect public opinion of Sotomayor in the least bit. I'm somewhat disappointed that she had to distance herself from the praise of "empathy" just to placate the angry GOP.
To their credit, they really did scour her on the New Haven Firefighter case, because that seems to be her only controversial decision and one that may show how she might judge in the future. This is where the opposition in the Senate really did their jobs well (as per "advice and consent"), though a lot of it was still visceral opposition to her.
I was also disappointed that while Democrats seemed to stand behind her without much conflict, they couldn't really substantiate why she was eminently qualified for the job (though they did invoke her life's story several times). This is why I can't give such details here because no one ever mentioned them.

Then again, there seems to be a consensus that the "advice and consent" has turned into a circus (or a musical!).