J L’s Reviews > Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment > Status Update

// Judgment can therefore be described as measurement in which the instrument is a human mind. Implicit in the notion of measurement is the goal of accuracy — to approach truth and minimize error.
The goal of judgment is not to impress, not to take a stand, not to persuade.//

// Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.

…organization that considers conflict avoidance at least as important as making the right decision. //

// We rarely question these beliefs. We hold a single interpretation of the world around us at any one time, and we normally invest little effort in generating plausible alternatives to it. One interpretation is enough, and we experience it as true. We do not go through life imagining alternative ways of seeing what we see. //

// Most of us, most of the time, live with the unquestioned belief that the world looks as it does because that's the way it is. There is one small step from this belief to another: "Other people view the world much the way I do." These beliefs, which have been called naive realism, are essential to the sense of a reality we share with other people. //

// System noise is a problem of systems, which are organizations, not markets.

In noisy systems, errors do not cancel out. They add up. //

// The price of reducing noise was to make decisions unacceptably mechanical.

System noise, that is, unwanted variability in judgments that should ideally be identical, can create rampant injustice, high economic costs, and errors of many kinds. //