“She reached for her ears it was loud
The aching of her skull gave her no choice!
He stood there shocked beyond words!
Like the adage, music for some, for others; Noise!…”
Do you know what is NOISE? Well, of course the phonetic version you would know! And of course Music for one may be noise for another and vice versa! There is also a noise which is a frequent terminology used in the Photography world especially the Digital Photography world where you have lots of “Noise” which in that context means that the resolution of the Photo is not good! Now finally there is a Noise which cannot be heard or seen!
But it is very much present in our daily interaction and causes tons of problems just like the actual Noise! In fact there is an entire book written on this phenomenon co written by the man who bought you Thinking; Fast and slow! Daniel Kanheman! Lets make some Noise!
So the story goes how a longtime customer accidentally submitted the same application file to two offices. Though the employees who reviewed the file were supposed to follow the same guidelines—and thus arrive at similar outcomes—the separate offices returned very different quotes!
Professionals in many organizations are assigned arbitrarily to cases: appraisers in credit-rating agencies, physicians in emergency rooms, underwriters of loans and insurance, and others.
Organizations expect consistency from these professionals: Identical cases should be treated similarly, if not identically.
The problem is that humans are unreliable decision makers; their judgments are strongly influenced by irrelevant factors, such as their current mood, the time since their last meal, and the weather.
Even otherwise with the prevalence of Reels and WhatsApp videos and information, misinformation and trends decide many decision making! Sometimes your thoughts and belief system compels you to alter or change your behaviour!
This chance variability of judgments is called noise. It is an invisible but relevant burden on the bottom line of many companies.
Luckily some jobs which are really important for the smooth functioning of a company or even a country are are noise-free!
Clerks at a bank or a post office or at Passport control office perform complex tasks, but they must follow strict rules that limit subjective judgment and guarantee, by design, that identical cases will be treated identically! In fact here the issue happens when there is deviation from normal which is another Noise! But most of the time the collection of documents and scrutiny is normally within a well defined system of rule or regulation which ensures that there is either no or Little Noise!
In contrast, medical professionals, loan officers, project managers, judges, and executives all make judgment calls, which are guided by informal experience and general principles rather than by rigid rules.
Even you would have experienced how no two doctors or two mechanics would ever word by word to each other’s diagnosis and/ or treatment! Of course this does not mean that they do not respect each other, but some decisions are not bound by strict rules! Only by Guidelines which can be treated differently by each professional which gives rise to Noise!
And if they don’t reach precisely the same answer that every other person in their role would, that’s acceptable; this is what we mean when we say that a decision is “a matter of judgment.”
This is an acceptable situation and is the reason why people take second opinion or another “look”.
Academic researchers have repeatedly confirmed that professionals often contradict their own prior judgments when given the same data on different occasions.
For instance, when software developers were asked on two separate days to estimate the completion time for a given task, the hours they projected differed by 71%, on average.
When pathologists made two assessments of the severity of biopsy results, the correlation between their ratings was only .61 (out of a perfect 1.0), indicating that they made inconsistent diagnoses quite frequently. Judgments made by different people are even more likely to diverge!
Research has confirmed that in many tasks, experts’ decisions are highly variable: valuing stocks, appraising real estate, sentencing criminals, evaluating job performance, auditing financial statements, and more. The unavoidable conclusion is that professionals often make decisions that deviate significantly from those of their peers, from their own prior decisions, and from rules that they themselves claim to follow.
This is the very reason why you have the series of courts! How one court gives a judgement which with the same evidence and proofs is either corrected or changed by a higher court!
It is less well known that the key advantage of algorithms is that they are noise-free: Unlike humans, a formula will always return the same output for any given input. Superior consistency allows even simple and imperfect algorithms to achieve greater accuracy than human professionals.
Like how it has been suggested that you give the same set of parameters to a machine the second time and expect a different result is actually an example of Insanity!
In a now popular study done in 1981, 208 federal judges were asked to determine the appropriate sentences for the same 16 cases. The cases were described by the characteristics of the offense (robbery or fraud, violent or not) and of the defendant (young or old, repeat, or first-time offender, accomplice, or principal). Of course you may think that judges would agree closely with each other since there were no distracting details and probe contained only relevant information!
But it was NOISY! The judges did not agree. 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!
Aggregated over the assessments made every year, the cost of noise has been measured in billions and the value of reducing noise even by a few percentage points would be in the tens of millions! And you thought the future is Noise cancellation headphones! The future is Noise cancellation! But of a different kind!
So how do we take care of this noise?
Well, one of the most radical solution to the noise problem is to replace human judgment with formal rules known as algorithms that use the data about a case to produce a prediction or a decision!
Practically put, no emotions! No NOISE! Of course when this cannot be done then you must bringing Discipline to Judgment and it has been suggested that professionals should be offered user-friendly tools, such as checklists and carefully formulated questions, to guide them as they collect information about a case, make intermediate judgments, and formulate a final decision!
Now Judgement and Noise reminds me of birthday celebrity Rajat Sharma!
Now turn off the Noisy (listening kind!) Television and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
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