Speaking of Occasion Noise “Judgment is like a free throw: however hard we try to repeat it precisely, it is never exactly identical.” “Your judgment depends on what mood you are in, what cases you have just discussed, and even what the weather is. You are not the same person at all times.” “Although you may not be the same person you were last week, you are less different from the ‘you’ of last week than you are from someone else today. Occasion noise is not the largest source of system noise.
Even when they are not sure they will succeed, these bold people think their fate is almost entirely in their own hands. They are surely wrong: the outcome of a start-up depends as much on the achievements of its competitors and on changes in the market as on its own efforts.
How Groups Amplify Noise.
We have defined noise as undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem. Since singular problems are never exactly repeated, this definition does not apply to them. After all, history is only run once. You will never be able to compare Obama’s decision to send.
Groups can go in all sorts of directions, depending in part on factors that should be irrelevant. Who speaks first, who speaks last, who speaks with confidence, who is wearing black, who is seated next to whom, who smiles or frowns or gestures at the right moment – all these factors, and many more, affect outcomes.
It might seem odd to emphasize this point, since we noted in the previous chapter that aggregating the judgments of multiple individuals reduces noise. But because of group dynamics, groups can add noise, too. There are “wise crowds,” whose mean judgment is close to the correct answer, but there are also crowds that follow tyrants, that fuel market bubbles, that believe in magic, or that are under the sway of a shared illusion.
As expected, probability judgments were higher for the richer and more detailed scenario, contrary to logic.
The premise of the session is a short speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.
She’s suing him for alimony. She would actually like to settle, but he prefers to go to court. That’s not surprising – she can only gain, so she’s risk averse. He, on the other hand, faces options that are all bad, so he’d rather take the risk.
Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations.
We cover long distances by taking our time and conduct our mental lives by the law of least effort.
Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort.
System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.
People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.” Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to racing motorcycles – and for some fortunate authors I know, even writing a book is often an optimal experience.
Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious experience without your knowing how they got there. You cannot trace how you came to the belief that there is a lamp on the desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation in your spouse’s voice on the telephone, or how you managed to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intuitions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind.
Allowing the observers to influence each other effectively reduces the size of the sample, and with it the precision of the group estimate.
Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.
I was telling them about an important principle of skill training: rewards for improved performance work better than punishment of mistakes.
A matter of judgment is one with some uncertainty about the answer and where we allow for the possibility that reasonable and competent people might disagree.