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.”
Abundant food for thought for professionals of all types as well as students of decision science and behavioral economics.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
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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