Noise #4: Is Elimination even Desirable?

If decisions are so noisy, how come we rarely hear of it? The authors of Noise say:

“The invisibility of noise is a direct consequence of causal thinking. Noise is inherently statistical: it becomes visible only when we think statistically about an ensemble of similar judgments.”

 

Further, when something is statistical, one doesn’t have a clear target what one is aiming at:

“Strategies for noise reduction are… what preventive hygiene measures are to medical treatment: the goal is to prevent an unspecified range of potential errors before they occur.”

They compare it the habit of washing your hands – you should do it without worrying about which particular infection you might be avoiding.

 

Unfortunately, such habits aren’t easy, because of the way we are wired:

“Correcting a well-identified bias may at least give you a tangible sense of achieving something. But the procedures that reduce noise will not. They will, statistically, prevent many errors. Yet you will never know which errors.”

 

There are also some reasons why people feel noise in decision making is either not practical or noise can actually be a good thing (in certain situations). First, the steps to reduce noise may be too expensive and not worth it. Second, the effort to reduce noise may introduce other problems, which might even be worse than the noise problem they intended to fix. Third, a little noise allows for discretion, allows for making deliberate exceptions – and that is sometimes a good thing. Fourth, if all noise were to be eliminated, systems cannot change or evolve – they’d be hardcoded based on what made sense earlier. Fifth, to eliminate noise, precise rules would have to be defined; but once that happens, people inevitably start to find ways to game the system (take advantage of the flaws in those precise rules). Sixth, noise sometimes acts as a deterrent e.g. if there’s even a small chance that a certain action may sometimes result in a very severe penalty. And lastly, eliminating noise makes decision makers feel like cogs in a wheel – they feel all discretion and opportunities for creativity have been removed.

 

And so we end on a predicament – noise is definitely not a good thing in some scenarios. It creates uncertainty, unpredictability, and outcomes begin to feel like a lottery. On the other hand, eliminating it leads to other problems. Knowing which ones to eliminate becomes a judgment call – which, by definition, has noise in it! So how would we even know which ones to eliminate and which ones to retain?

 

While we can’t know the answer to that, I felt the book was a great read that made me aware of a problem one barely notices, even if there is no magic bullet to address it.