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A review by rick2
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Cass R. Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony
1.0
You know what the real lesson here is, don’t pre-order books based on the authors reputation alone. In a world filled with noise, these authors contribute to it through their generally inadequate book.
I really wanted to like this. I liked Nudge which has Cass as an author, I generally liked Thinking Fast and Slow, and I want someone who’s not Nate Silver explain signal to noise ratios to help me curate better information in my life. But this book isn’t it. This book is literally noise. Worthless noise in an already noisy world.
Someone like Kahneman, a founder of behavioral economics, you would think would have interesting new research and considered takes on how to cut through the amount of chatter out there in the world. It’s an important problem. But it seems like behavioral economics has stalled out into finding goofy and minor errors in our cognitive biases. Hey look! two people came to different answers when asked to mentally calculate an abstract concept. Look at how I can create methodologically dubious and unreplicatible studies that confuse people into making decisions against their best interests. Am I a behavioral economist yet?
I’m so sick of people writing shitty books to promote themselves as “thought leaders” and charge more for their consulting. I expected a better book out of these authors but found myself extremely disappointed in the shallowness of the ideas and writing. It’s a bad regurgitation of ideas that has been done better in other places.
If you like feeling cocktail-party smart without actually having to put in the effort to be smart, you will probably like this. It’s full of pithy blurbs. (Judges are impacted by whether or not their favorite football team won the night before.) Memorize a few and you’ll impress your wife’s-bosses-cousin in no time. Freakonomics did it better. But the fundamental problem is that this book doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been beaten to death before.
Essentially decisions come down to judgments and judgments can be skewed through bias and noise. Noise = randomness except it’s a lot harder to charge six figure consulting fees when you say “oh jeez, there’s just a lot of randomness all up in here.” Much sexier to call it a “noise audit” and point to your crappy book as a guide. People may not be great predictors but we sure are predictably gullible.
Then this book plays a bad game of telephone where the authors summarize research they did not do, and at times seems like it might’ve been sourced from a Reddit comment section, in an effort to make their publishers and publicist happy by hitting a page count.
Read Phillip Tetlocks “Expert Political Judgement” and “Superforcasting” for better and more in depth research on the core topics covered here. Invisible Women does a good job with some of this. Honestly this book felt like a psych sophomore five solo cups of thunder punch deep trying to explain their thoughts on cognitive bias. Don’t waste your time.
I really wanted to like this. I liked Nudge which has Cass as an author, I generally liked Thinking Fast and Slow, and I want someone who’s not Nate Silver explain signal to noise ratios to help me curate better information in my life. But this book isn’t it. This book is literally noise. Worthless noise in an already noisy world.
Someone like Kahneman, a founder of behavioral economics, you would think would have interesting new research and considered takes on how to cut through the amount of chatter out there in the world. It’s an important problem. But it seems like behavioral economics has stalled out into finding goofy and minor errors in our cognitive biases. Hey look! two people came to different answers when asked to mentally calculate an abstract concept. Look at how I can create methodologically dubious and unreplicatible studies that confuse people into making decisions against their best interests. Am I a behavioral economist yet?
I’m so sick of people writing shitty books to promote themselves as “thought leaders” and charge more for their consulting. I expected a better book out of these authors but found myself extremely disappointed in the shallowness of the ideas and writing. It’s a bad regurgitation of ideas that has been done better in other places.
If you like feeling cocktail-party smart without actually having to put in the effort to be smart, you will probably like this. It’s full of pithy blurbs. (Judges are impacted by whether or not their favorite football team won the night before.) Memorize a few and you’ll impress your wife’s-bosses-cousin in no time. Freakonomics did it better. But the fundamental problem is that this book doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been beaten to death before.
Essentially decisions come down to judgments and judgments can be skewed through bias and noise. Noise = randomness except it’s a lot harder to charge six figure consulting fees when you say “oh jeez, there’s just a lot of randomness all up in here.” Much sexier to call it a “noise audit” and point to your crappy book as a guide. People may not be great predictors but we sure are predictably gullible.
Then this book plays a bad game of telephone where the authors summarize research they did not do, and at times seems like it might’ve been sourced from a Reddit comment section, in an effort to make their publishers and publicist happy by hitting a page count.
Read Phillip Tetlocks “Expert Political Judgement” and “Superforcasting” for better and more in depth research on the core topics covered here. Invisible Women does a good job with some of this. Honestly this book felt like a psych sophomore five solo cups of thunder punch deep trying to explain their thoughts on cognitive bias. Don’t waste your time.