More insights into human thinking

Having read “Thing, Fast and Slow”, this feels like a great sequel. Some thougts were already present in that book, but are of course greatly expanded here.

However, I’m unhappy with the narrator. The stress of the voice is often at parts of the sentence that I would consider less important. I need to concentrate a lot to rearrange the parts in my mind to be coherent. Also, this is a non-fiction book that not only contains continuous text. There are several sub-headings and at the end of the chapter important quotes; none of those are clearly seperated by voice.

In a similar vein: Why am I forced to rate the story of this book in order to write my review? That does not apply to non-fiction texts at all.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

15 Leute fanden das hilfreich

Brilliant and important book

I hope many people will read or listen to this book. It explains the problem of noise which most people are completely unaware of and which causes lots of harm in many areas. This book could and should influence many people to take this severe problem of noise seriously and fight it in the future.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

1 Person fand das hilfreich

Why did they rename "variance" to "noise"?

There is a perfectly fine mathematical term "variance" used to describe variance in measurements. Here the authors somehow decided to confuse it with another mathematical term noise which most of the time means uncertainty in the measurement set up. Why would you do that? I was struggling to grasp the main point up until they said that MSE = bias squared + noise, but it should actually be simply called variance.

The whole book can be summarized as "there's a much larger variance in decisions that we expect to be rather accurate", be it judges giving sentences or doctors deciding treatment. The examples are in fact well chosen and a little bit jaw-dropping, but I couldn't look past this erroneous use of perfectly fine mathematical terms.

I also feel like the authors stressed MSE too much, there are also other metrics. They did mention that in the middle and in the end, but failed to stress that for other accuracy cannot in general be split into bias squared + variance

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

6 Leute fanden das hilfreich

Informative but hard going

Some very good stories but a tough listen. Sometimes repetitive which left me listening for 30 minutes to summaries of points already made clear.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

1 Person fand das hilfreich

Excellent

Another great book of Kahnemann. Highly recommend it, learned some new things. Very good read.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

Advertisement for consultancy services

I am some hours in and I am now giving up as I have so far learned nothing I consider useful for my own decision making processes. The authors came across to me as to trying to sell their consultancy services to companies, this book being an advertisment for their services. But why one should conduct a "noise audit" is anyone's guess. The authors claim that by filtering noise but not bias, a decision making process, e.g. a forecast for a future market share of a company in a given marketplace, can be made more consistent. E.g. in a noise audit, when several of a company's forecasters make the same forecast the results are distributed along a bell curve. What the authors want to achieve is that all forecasts are identical or near identical. They do not aim to or claim to be able to make the forecasts more accurate through a noise audit! They just want the decisions to be more consistently wrong by emphasizing the decision making process! The remaining error then being defined as bias which is to be tackled by somebody else and not the concern of this book. If this seems nonsensical to you and you can imagine the miriad of problems arising from prioritizing consistency then consider yourself warned. Otherwise by all means buy this book.

Sie haben diese Rezension bewertet.

Wir haben Ihre Meldung erhalten und werden die Rezension prüfen.

2 Leute fanden das hilfreich