Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman talks to Barry Ritholtz about “noise”, here…
”Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Danny Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow. His empirical findings with Amos Tversky challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory, and established a cognitive basis for human error. His latest book is Noise: A flaw in human judgment cowritten with Oliver Sibony and Cass Sunstein.”
And here is a piece by the authors in The NY Times…
”…The average difference between the sentences that two randomly chosen judges gave for the same crime was more than 3.5 years. Considering that the mean sentence was seven years, that was a disconcerting amount of noise.
Noise in real courtrooms is surely only worse, as actual cases are more complex and difficult to judge than stylized vignettes. It is hard to escape the conclusion that sentencing is in part a lottery, because the punishment can vary by many years depending on which judge is assigned to the case and on the judge’s state of mind on that day. The judicial system is unacceptably noisy.”
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