I have been watching the hoopla around Noise, a recent book by Nobel laureate Kahneman and coauthors Sibony and Sunstein. See, for instance, Rachael Meager’s tweets on causation vs. correlation.
In the interview with Sunstein, there is an underlying notion that researchers have not been thinking about noise, and only thinking about “bias”. This puzzled me.
THINKADVISOR: Why is it important to be aware of noise? You write that it’s “rarely mentioned” and “goes unnoticed”; yet “it can cause grave damage.”
CASS SUNSTEIN: Noise is unwanted variability. Each of us is noisy, some more than others. We’re learning that noise is often the most important “character” in human life. Unlike bias, noise isn’t intuitive, which is why we think we discovered a new continent. Noise is like the character in the background of a movie that you don’t pay a lot of attention to but who turns out to be the most important one, as you learn at the end.
I do not know if psychology researchers have not paid a lot of attention to Noise. (In fact, I don’t believe that is true). But it is definitely not the case for fields such as Statistics, Economics, Operations Research, and Electrical Engineering. In my introductory class sessions on Forecasting, I spend a lot of time arguing how even with the best techniques you cannot eliminate “noise”. (In fact, the purpose of forecasting is not accurate predictions, but that’s a blog post for another day).
On his blog, Andrew Gelman delves into this issue in one of his recent posts. I think he frames the issues around noise better than I ever could. I think his note is a charitable view of how the positioning of noise in the book came out to be so unrecognizing of past work. He speculates it might have come from the delegation of authorship and particularly chides the puzzling “chain of trust” in how it has been praised by good people.
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When I was a teenager, I read an astounding short story by SF author Isaac Asimov, called the Nightfall. It was a brilliant story about people on a planet who see stars for the first time, and he proverbially created the story based on an Emerson quote. In college, we tried to do a stage production of the story, and we had to write the screenplay based on the story. In that effort, I read the novelized version of NightFall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. I found it overwrought, poorly written, and unnecessary exposition of a powerful short concept. It lacked the pizazz and punch of the short story. For science fiction and fantasy fans, the length of a book is never a big constraint. My friend had a simple theory — he attributed the issue to the coauthor Robert Silverberg. My friend held to his theory so strongly that he thought the mere presence of Silverberg on the cover was a signal to “avoid” the book.
Asimov was already famous, and probably good friends with Silverberg. Once they chose to novelize it, Asimov, who was probably short on time because of his prodigious writing engagements, the theory goes, must have not put in a detailed effort to make the plot and the writing better. (Now, I think even Asimov was sometimes verbose and overwrought. You only need to read the Foundation sequels to realize this). But the theory of “association and delegation” seems to make sense. In fact, Asimov confirms it in his autobiography.
Eventually, I received the extended Nightfall manuscript from Bob [Silverberg]… Bob did a wonderful job and I could almost believe I had written the whole thing myself. He remained absolutely faithful to the original story[,] and I had very little to argue with.
I know little about the personal lives of Nobel laureates, but I believe that there would be inordinate demands on their time. So, my friend’s “association and delegation” theory is quite appealing. In some ways, it is a benign explanation. Nobel laureates have often pursued pet theories post their prize. In history, there have some abominable “research” pursuits such as Shockley. I find the association and delegation upsetting, but far less harmful.
The chain of trust is an issue in the world where skepticism of experts is exploding. Academia is full of highly motivated people intent on popularizing their personal brand. “I am only pursuing challenging research questions” is a reasoning that is alarmingly indistinguishable from actions that seek self-promotion. For such promotion, one needs benefits and blessings from other researchers of esteem. So you be nice to them in public, and the chain continues.
Let me return to the book. The few pages of the book that I read in the store disappointed me. All books have some drawbacks, but this book is not the best work of Kahneman.