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Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment Hardcover – May 18 2021

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• Print length 464 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Little, Brown Spark
• Publication date May 18 2021
• Dimensions 16.26 x 4.7 x 24.38 cm
• ISBN-10 0316451401
• ISBN-13 978-0316451406
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown Spark (May 18 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316451401
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316451406
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 658 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.26 x 4.7 x 24.38 cm
• #218 in Cognitive Science
• #219 in Cognitive Psychology in Professional Science
• #307 in Applied Psychology (Books)

About the authors

Daniel kahneman.

Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎, born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.

In 2015 The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by see page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Olivier Sibony

Olivier Sibony is a professor, writer and advisor specializing in the quality of strategic thinking and the design of decision processes. Olivier teaches Strategy, Decision Making and Problem Solving at HEC Paris. He is also an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School in Oxford University.

Before he was a professor, Olivier spent 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France and in the U.S., where he was a Senior Partner. There, he was, at various times, a leader of the Global Strategy Practice and of the Consumer Goods & Retail Sector.

Olivier’s research interests focus on improving the quality of decision-making by reducing the impact of behavioral biases. He is the author of articles in various publications including “Before You Make That Big Decision”, co-authored with Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, which was selected as the cover feature of Harvard Business Review’s book selection of “10 Must-Reads on Making Smart Decisions”. In French, he also authored a book, Réapprendre à Décider.

Olivier builds on this research and on his experience to advise senior leaders on strategic and operational decision-making. He is a frequent keynote speaker and facilitator of senior management and supervisory board meetings. He also serves as a member of corporate, advisory and investment boards.

Olivier Sibony is a graduate of HEC Paris and holds a Ph. D. from Université Paris-Dauphine.

He lives in Paris.

Cass R. Sunstein

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Simpler: The Future of Government and Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter.

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Noise Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Noise delves into the concept of randomness and talks about how we as humans make decisions that prove to be life-changing, without putting the necessary thought into it, and how we can strengthen our thinking processes.

Favorite quote from the author:

Table of Contents

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Noise book summary, noise review, who would i recommend our noise summary to.

Noise is a random mistake in our judgment. The book uses this notion to describe what humans often do without even realizing, and that is making apparently insignificant errors in judgment , which prove to be life-changing in the long run. 

By becoming better at spotting our own cognitive biases, our inclination to see the subjective perspective as a universal truth, and always questioning our judgment, we can learn to anticipate mistakes and avoid altering the course of our thinking, our actions, and implicitly our lives for the worse. Therefore, Noise by Daniel Kahneman delves deep into these concepts and teaches us how to strengthen our minds and improve our thinking processes.

Here are my three favorite lessons from the book:

• To err is human, therefore we have a natural inclination toward certain biases.
• Humans make wrong predictions almost all the time.
• The “wisdom-of-crowds” is a real thing if the sample of people is appropriate for the situation.

If you want to fully understand the lessons presented, keep on reading, as I’ll take each of them one by one and analyze them in detail!

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Lesson 1: Our biases can lead to life-altering decisions, so we must learn to spot them to be able to eradicate them .

All humans make mistakes. However, it is the degree and frequency of those mistakes that alter the course of our path and the lives of those around us. Moreover, if we are in powerful positions, such as heads of admission committees, judges, or any other profession that calls for neutrality and a strong mind that can carry cognitive processes almost err-free, we must eliminate the mistakes and biases completely. Ultimately, it’s a moral responsibility and not just a professional one. 

Therefore, to do away with biases and errors in the thinking process , you must first learn how to recognize them. A bias is usually used to describe one’s inclination to devalue another human based on personal assumptions. However, a bias is just a systematic error we make in our thinking process, which ultimately alters our judgment. Although it’s not the same as noise, it can lead to it. 

The types of biases are many, but let’s take one in particular for example: the conclusion bias. Sometimes, we have a desired outcome in mind and therefore interpret all information in a way favorable to that outcome. Naturally, this affects our judgment and the course of our actions. However, asking yourself questions like: “am I true to myself in the decisions I’m taking?” or “am I being fair by indulging in this action?” can help you question your perspective and get back on the right track.

Lesson 2: Humans are naturally inclined to seek closure and blindly follow a flawed gut when making predictions.

Predictions are more accurate when complex algorithms and high-performance machines make them instead of humans. But that’s not something that may come as a surprise. Still, why is that? In simple words, humans are prone to error and subjectivity, and we’re way too confident in our gut’s ability to make predictions. Our brain seeks answers to questions, closure, and that feeling of “rightness”.

Therefore, we look for convenient answers that make us feel good and give us the closure we’ve been seeking, even though that may not be the right one. A trained mind can get past the initial barriers of noise, such as the conclusion bias , and therefore seek the truth in the matter. Still, what if you truly don’t know the answer? Imagine being a judge who has to decide for the lives of so many people and their families all the time. And being confronted with this huge burden without knowing which is the correct answer. Naturally, their mind gravitates toward finding an answer that feels right and gives them closure.  

Studies show that simple algorithms and basic formulas can outperform judges with years of experience when it comes to predicting the correct outcome of a trial and what the criminals will do. Why is that? Due to the noise! Noise can blur our judgment and allow the emotional factor to disturb our rationality. This is how we end up in objective ignorance, which is a state of mind where we’re looking for a satisfying prediction that fulfills our inner desire for closure, rightness, and the answer to a burning question.

Lesson 3: Noise gets canceled by averaging the opinions of people through the wisdom-of-crowds .

You may have or may have not heard of the wisdom-of-crowds, but either way, let me explain this remarkable concept in detail. In a nutshell, it states that although the individual opinions of people on a given matter vary and are sometimes completely opposite from each other, once you average them, the result is most likely the correct answer, or not too far from it, anyways. 

So why is that? In simple terms, noise cancels noise. In various studies, averaging the answers of people who were asked the number of beans in a jar, the distance between two cities, or other different questions whatsoever, proved to result in a value extremely close to the truth. However, to make this concept work, we must respect a few rules. First, the subjects must be independent of each other. Their opinions mustn’t be influenced. And the question has to be the same and formulated equally for each participant. 

Then, the crowd must be diversified in a way that they don’t share the same bias. If they do, they’ll gravitate towards the same answers, and therefore alter the effect of this concept through a lack of diversity. While the wisdom-of-crowds doesn’t guarantee a solution to the noise in our minds and a sure pathway to the truth, it’s getting us one step closer to finding answers to burning questions and solutions for problems we find hard to fix.

Noise teaches us how to spot errors in our thinking and get rid of the undesired variability in our judgment. Learn to address problems step by step, then find the correct solutions. A worthy read from a Nobel Prize winner!

The 45-year-old soon-to-be judge who wants to strengthen their mind before starting their journey in this field, the 30-year-old person who wants to work on their cognitive biases and understand their judgment mechanism so as to improve it, or the 40-year-old behavioral economist who wants to expand their knowledge in this field by approaching inter-related subjects.

Last Updated on May 6, 2024

While working with my friend Ovi's company SocialBee, I had the good fortune of Maria writing over 200 summaries for us over the course of 18 months. Maria is a professional SEO copywriter, content writer, and social media marketing specialist. When she's not writing or learning more about marketing, she loves to dance and travel all over the world.

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Kaibalyapati Mishra

January 20th, 2022, book review: noise: a flaw in human judgment by daniel kahneman, olivier sibony and cass r. sunstein.

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Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

In  Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment ,  Daniel Kahneman ,  Olivier Sibony and  Cass R. Sunstein explore how ‘noise’ affects human judgment and reflect on what we can do to address this. This novel book will help readers to better understand the processes we undertake in decision-making and how to encourage more informed and principled decisions, writes Kaibalyapati Mishra .

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment . Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein. William Collins. 2021. 

‘Where there are six economists, there are seven opinions.’ – Barbara Wootton

Human judgments are eccentric. Many factors influence them and vary across individuals, times, situations. Some judgments are biased towards or against certain phenomena, showing predictable systematic deviation from desirable human behaviour, while some are unpredictable; they are noisy . In Noise , the authors highlight such crucial flaws of human judgment which they define as random/chaotic deviations from targeted behaviour that invite no causal explanation. Written by Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2002, and writer of Thinking Fast & Slow ), eminent legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein (writer of Nudge ) and Olivier Sibony, Professor of Strategy & Business Policy at HEC Paris, the book elaborates on how to find and measure the occurrence of ‘noise’, while detailing how we can avoid such flaws at length.

Starting from the use of heuristics (the mental shortcuts that humans frequently use to arrive at conclusions in decision-making) to undue emphasis on scales and patterns, bias can shape human judgment through various means. When assessing their ability to finish a task on time, individuals overestimate their capacities, committing planning fallacy bias. To avoid answering a difficult question (how is your life going?), people answer the easier alternative (how am I feeling now?), substituting judgments with something that more easily comes to mind, thereby committing availability heuristics bias. Similarly, we often tend to collect pieces of evidence that confirm our existing beliefs, which is known as confirmation bias. Thus, reserved judgments (prejudgments) guided by our feelings sometimes direct our thinking, which is an instance of ‘after heuristics’ . As the popular saying goes, ‘first impressions last longest’, indicating that initial judgments form a coherence (or halo) that directs our evaluation of others. This is a result of excessive coherence , which dictates our reluctance to change our predisposed conclusions.

Yet, noise also enjoys a huge hold. Imagine that you are a judge at a sentencing hearing. Will you be less harsh on the convicted person if the date of the hearing is your birthday? Will you be harsher if they belong to a community other than yours? In the latter case, the outcome of your judgment can be termed biased. However, in the former case, it is difficult to predict the deviation of the outcome. This is noise . The authors write that ‘the unfettered discretion the law confers on those judges and parole authorities responsible for imposing and implementing the sentences’ (18) often leads to different sentencing decisions between judges and even for the same judge over time. Such deviations can be revealed through noise audits, whereby the same people make judgments about several cases and their judgments are studied. They can also be dealt with through specific policies, such as assigning a bench of judges to a case to reduce noise.

In many other cases, individual judgments are made under the illusion of agreement : the feeling that ‘other people see the world much the way I do’ (31) , a position of naïve realism. Decisions taken only once (singular decisions) and decisions taken over continuous intervals (recurrent decisions) can both exert noise in decision-making. Thus, the authors write that ‘a singular decision is a recurrent decision that happens only once’ (38). It is evident that just as singular decisions add up, noise doesn’t cancel itself out. It too adds up.

If human decisions are the outcomes and judgments are the means, then the construction of decisions is measured by the instrument of the human mind. The variability of judgments indicates the deviation taken from the average of decisions made under familiar conditions over time (measured statistically as standard deviation). A major source of such variability is selective attention and recall, which indicates partial attention towards attributes that make the judgment imbalanced. However, noise due to variability can relate to within-person variability (where one person makes different decisions regarding the same judgment over time) or between-person variability (where different people make different judgments regarding the same situation). Thus, the measurement and reduction of such variability (noise) should have the same priority given to bias, as both bias and noise are the two constituents of judgmental errors.

Just as adding together individuals constitutes a group, adding together individual decisions constitutes group judgments. These are expected to reduce noise, but they are conditioned by group dynamics. Among a number of factors, social influence is a major driver of noise. If individuals in a group are connected and dependent on one another, their judgment is assumed to be interdependent and influenced by that of others. From choosing a song that is labelled as ‘most listened to’ to voting for a political party that attracts large rallies and provokes Twitter trends, these might indicate noisy decisions. This tendency to follow the masses irrespective of personal inclination has been termed ‘the wisdom of the crowd’. Thus, social influence is a problem that reduces group diversity without diminishing collective error. Other forms of social influence like information cascades (where people tend to reject the possibility that the rest are influenced) and group polarisation (when people discuss a certain topic and the judgments tend to become more extreme in comparison to their original inclinations) are also prevalent.

Human intuition is able to assign values to the intensity of particular attributes. For example, looking at a person’s wealth, we can categorise them as well-off, affluent, comfortable, wealthy and so on. But without matching values of wealth to categories, the same level of wealth can get interpreted differently and assigned different categories by different people. For instance,  someone with 10 million US dollars income per year might be categorised as wealthy, affluent or super-rich by different people. When judging attributes, noise occurs due to the variability of scale units: ‘people might differ in judgement not because they disagree but because they scale differently’ (189).

The authors highlight how the use of simple models (like linear regression, ‘the workhorse of judgement and decision making research’) reduces noise and increases the accuracy of judgments that people usually make (where they consider the information, do mild computation and use their intuition respectively). Research has shown that our satisfaction with personal judgment is an illusion (of validity), and the model of us does better than us, the critical reason being noise in judgments. The argument for mechanical approaches (artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, etc) has been made by studies . However, it is worth considering whether it is feasible for individuals to exercise such models to improve their judgments and decisions (this is an issue on which the authors seem to be silent).

Something that needs some balance is the possible shortcomings of the acknowledgement and removal of noise. This is because reducing noise involves audits and is thus expensive. Strategies introduced to reduce noise might instead create some errors (327) . For instance, if all doctors of a hospital prescribe the same medicine to every patient with the same disease, it will be havoc because physical characteristics vary in individuals (for instance, between an older patient and a young child), therefore they shouldn’t all be treated with the same medicines. Sometimes excessive control imposition to reduce noise can cost people respect and dignity: while individualised processes incur noise, they give people the power to exercise discretion and may encourage morale, creativity and novelty. Such shortcomings have necessitated a trade-off between noise and affordable errors.

Moreover, algorithms and advanced applications can cause prejudiced actions, leading to increased inequality in exercising power. That is because the individuals who design algorithms, and the key stakeholders who legally hold them, will have the discretion to make judgments that favour their interests politically, legally, institutionally and financially.

Gerd Gigerenzer , the exponent of the concept of ecological rationality , also opines that rationality is a relative concept and the use of heuristics doesn’t always lead to bias or noisy decisions. Heuristics are beautiful psychological creations that help us make decisions when the need is instinctive. For instance, when a fielder is going to catch a ball falling from the sky, they are not going to use models to reduce error; nor will they check the probabilities. Their intuitions (about the distance, the degree of the ball’s trajectory to the ground, etc) are the strength they are going to use. Thus, noise is acceptable to some extent when other remedies are not feasible.

Noise is a novel venture of its kind, as it helps readers to realise the processes we undertake in decision-making. Further research on the topic can help to devise mechanisms that can be used for the avoidance of noise and thus encourage more informed and principled decisions.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

About the author

I am a PhD research scholar in the Centre for Economic Studies and Policy at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, India. My primary research interests are market design, information structures and behavioural economics. I can be reached at [email protected].

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What a 1985 Novel Can Tell Us About Life in the 2020s: Almost Everything

Don DeLillo’s book “White Noise,” newly adapted for the screen by Noah Baumbach, precisely diagnosed the modern condition, Dana Spiotta writes.

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By Dana Spiotta

• Dec. 30, 2022

Noah Baumbach’s funny and very stylish film adaptation of “White Noise” is a great invitation to return to the source material, Don DeLillo’s novel from almost 40 years ago. When I reread it, I was struck by how hilarious it still is, how accurate to its moment (what in an interview DeLillo called “the particular skin of the late 20th century”) and yet, like all great books, how it also speaks to this moment; the same absurdities and ironies still apply.

“White Noise” is a high comic novel about death, or about fear of death. “White Noise” is a campus novel, “White Noise” is a family romance, “White Noise” is proto-cli-fi, with man-made environmental contaminations. “White Noise” is a critique of corporate capitalism, from branding to malevolent pharmaceutical products. But above all, “White Noise” is about language: the specific language of America in 1985, but also the perpetual way that language is a complicated human gift, an avenue for answering back to the terrible terms (death) of our existence, but also an apparatus that can be deployed to obscure and overwhelm reality. “White Noise” doesn’t have the historical reach of DeLillo’s books “Underworld” or “Libra,” or the international gravitas of “The Names,” all extraordinary novels. It has instead powerful constraints of time, place and people: one academic year in one place, a small, prosperous American college town, and one middle-class white family, both ordinary and not.

“White Noise” is often reductively described as a satire of American consumer culture. And while of course it is satirical, I would argue that it is more deeply alchemic. When DeLillo notices and listens to the world, he arranges its “codes and messages” and transforms chaotic overload into forms that give us meaning and beauty. He takes the common language of the time, such as brand names (“Panasonic”), talk radio, TV voices, advertising, tabloids, bureaucracy (“state-created terminology”), and displaces them or invents his own versions of them so that we can see and hear them. Although writers have long appropriated advertising language to convey the experience of modernity (e.g. Joyce inserting the tagline for Plumtree’s Potted Meat throughout “Ulysses”), DeLillo takes this language to an uncanny, almost mystical level. He uses cadence, patterns, density. Startling insertions and juxtapositions. Spaced out in the novel, often in its own paragraph apropos of nothing before it, we get lines of three brand names separated by commas: “Dacron, Orlon, Lycra Spandex,” “Mastercard, Visa, American Express,” “Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue.” The pattern is constructed, artful. One notices the rhythm, the beats, the pleasing feel in the mouth. Names dislocated from their usual places, set in a novel, made into poetry.

He frequently interrupts the action with lines (either found or invented) from TV and radio. He even uses speech tags: “I heard the TV say: ‘Let’s sit half lotus and think about our spines.’” And: “The TV said: ‘This creature has developed a complicated stomach in keeping with its leafy diet.’” Such insertions of random language occur all the time in real life, yet we absorb and don’t notice them. But of course, these aren’t random when we read them in “White Noise.” They are chosen, arranged, invented for us to laugh at but also to listen closely to.

Perhaps the apotheosis of the mimetic but highly constructed comes in the dialogue of this family, overlapping, associative, argumentative, perfectly evoking the intimate secret systems of familial language. DeLillo takes his remarkable receiver for how people speak to one another and then turns up the embedded absurdity to a higher, stylized pitch. This is very funny and evokes the “pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly … we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things.”

The book’s attention to the “unlocatable roar” of our age also plays out in how the characters react to events in which language both identifies and obscures what is happening. When a plane starts to hurtle to earth, the pilot on the intercom blurts: “We’re falling out of the sky! We’re going down! We’re a silver gleaming death machine!” A plane crashing becomes a machine of death, but DeLillo’s insertion of “silver gleaming” is unexpected, ridiculous, what makes it so funny. We believe and trust technology because humans like gleaming things. It is also funny because an unspoken truth has been hurled like an exaltation, an orgasm. Desire for safety extends until it reveals its inherent absurdity: Simuvac runs simulated evacuations, but the simulations seem more real to people than the actual emergencies because the danger is only evident in their own bodies rather than via official channels and technical personnel. What is first described as a “feathery plume,” then “a black billowing cloud,” finally becomes the “airborne toxic event,” as tracking each iteration or recitation becomes more powerful than the experience of the thing itself. When the children start reporting their symptoms to their parents, they are informed that they are exhibiting “outdated symptoms,” as the news reportage is more attended than the actual experience. Characters lose their ability to use language to discern meaning or even to make sense of what is happening in the world. And there is Dylar, a drug that has the side effect of making people unable to “distinguish between words and things.”

And yet, the book’s close examination exposes a luminous aura that is both real and ironic. After contamination, the sunsets last for hours and are so vivid that they take people out of their everyday concerns the way a cathedral might have in another time. Things are degraded, absurd, but at the same time they are almost sacred. The supermarket is a place of everyday excess. Yet it glows with light, full of “blasts of color, layers of oceanic sound.” And, my favorite: “Children sailed by in silver carts.” “Toyota Celica” spoken by a child in her sleep is an utterance “gold-shot with looming wonder.” Like Simon Rodia, the immigrant artist who built the Watts Towers out of found and broken stuff (a feat described in “Underworld”), DeLillo is taking the detritus of American culture, the ordinary things we hear and say, the appliances and technology that shape us, and extending his precise noticing until it transforms how we see ourselves within our world.

All these feats of linguistic alchemy make it so that when you finish “White Noise,” you see the “colloquial density” in a new way. You now understand what people mean when they notice something in real life and describe it as DeLillo-esque. And things have only become more DeLillo-esque.

While “White Noise” is intentionally specific to 1985, the tendencies described have only intensified. The global pandemic had its own ever-shifting language that felt akin to being told that we were exhibiting “outdated symptoms.” The appliances DeLillo listened to (“the thermostat began to buzz”) now literally speak (and listen, unnervingly) to us. TV with its “narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power” has been supplanted by the internet and iPhones, but we are more than ever overloaded by “the incessant bombardment of information” described in the novel. A bombardment we absorb but don’t notice. More than ever “we are the sum total of our data.” I put my finger on my touchscreen and tap the New York Times app. I see a headline: How the Global Spyware Industry Spiraled Out of Control. Right under it is the next headline, 20 Cookie Videos That Will Put You in the Holiday Spirit. If I push down a quarter-inch on the screen, I see an ad: Unisys — Don’t follow business trends. Lead them. With the words “break through” in a click button. If I notice the ad at all, I think: What behavior-tracking algorithm got me so wrong? But also: Maybe the algorithm knows more about me than I know about me? That self-reflexivity, if you can bother to form it into a sentence, is the beginning of something shaped like a joke that maybe saves you from total annihilation. The same tensions DeLillo mined so eloquently still grip us. How to be human amid the ubiquity and velocity of data, the endless streams of non sequiturs, the static of modern life. By delineating precisely what it was/is like to be alive then/now, DeLillo lights up the everyday world that we don’t see as we live it, the white noise all around us.

Dana Spiotta’s most recent novel is “Wayward.”

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Noise Paperback – April 1, 2021

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• Language English
• Publisher HARPER COLLINS
• Publication date April 1, 2021
• Dimensions 6.02 x 1.42 x 9.21 inches
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HARPER COLLINS (April 1, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008309000
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008309008
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.26 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.02 x 1.42 x 9.21 inches
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Daniel kahneman.

Daniel Kahneman (Hebrew: דניאל כהנמן‎, born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Vernon L. Smith). His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors that arise from heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979).

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. In the same year, his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of his research, was published and became a best seller. He is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of TGG Group, a business and philanthropy consulting company. He is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.

In 2015 The Economist listed him as the seventh most influential economist in the world.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by see page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cass R. Sunstein

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Simpler: The Future of Government and Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter.

Olivier Sibony

Olivier Sibony is a professor, writer and advisor specializing in the quality of strategic thinking and the design of decision processes. Olivier teaches Strategy, Decision Making and Problem Solving at HEC Paris. He is also an Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School in Oxford University.

Before he was a professor, Olivier spent 25 years with McKinsey & Company in France and in the U.S., where he was a Senior Partner. There, he was, at various times, a leader of the Global Strategy Practice and of the Consumer Goods & Retail Sector.

Olivier’s research interests focus on improving the quality of decision-making by reducing the impact of behavioral biases. He is the author of articles in various publications including “Before You Make That Big Decision”, co-authored with Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, which was selected as the cover feature of Harvard Business Review’s book selection of “10 Must-Reads on Making Smart Decisions”. In French, he also authored a book, Réapprendre à Décider.

Olivier builds on this research and on his experience to advise senior leaders on strategic and operational decision-making. He is a frequent keynote speaker and facilitator of senior management and supervisory board meetings. He also serves as a member of corporate, advisory and investment boards.

Olivier Sibony is a graduate of HEC Paris and holds a Ph. D. from Université Paris-Dauphine.

He lives in Paris.

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Don DeLillo's White Noise: a novel way of dismantling consumerist excess

DeLillo’s flair with language paints a picture of a strange world, where the holy trinity – ‘Mastercard, Visa, American Express’ – distracts from our mortality

Don DeLillo is a writer in love with words. He’s often spoken about the almost physical pleasure he takes in putting black on white, in banging out syllables on his noisy old typewriter, of watching sentences take shape in front of him. He delights in the ebb and flow of language, in riding a lulling rhythm and also in disrupting that rhythm. The sudden shorter sentence. He also just seems to enjoy words for their own sake. Their quiddity; you get the impression that he revels in the fact that if he writes “shoe”, you’ll immediately think of the thing you wear on your foot. He loves to itemise, to catalogue, to amplify.

In White Noise, he does so to fine effect. This novel bursts with language. Most obviously, the early chapters are full of long, exuberant lists. There’s a typically fine example on the very first page:

The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts.

These are lovely word pictures, at once mundane and strange (why are the rafts “inflated”?). And it goes on. The lists are often simple – but also lovely in sound and cadence. “Blue, green, burgundy, brown. They gleamed in the sun like a desert caravan.” They can also be hilarious: “The ashram is located on the outskirts of the former copper-smelting town of Tubb, Montana now called Dharamsalapur. The usual rumors abound of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkey-worship, torture, prolonged and hideous death.”

But the lists aren’t just their for their own sake. This bounty of language at the start of the book, this overflow and variety, and this overwhelming choice of words on offer, all complements a growing idea in the novel about the excesses of consumerism. Sometimes, the lists are explicitly about goods and consumption. People don’t just carry cameras, there are also: “tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits.” Shopping is to be catalogued and inspected: “He picked up a bottle of extra-strength pain reliever and sniffed along the rim of the child-proof cap. He smelled our honeydew melons, our bottles of club soda and ginger ale.” And again: “There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright.”

The most frequent criticism I’ve read of White Noise is that by talking about advertising, suburbia, the supermarket, DeLillo isn’t doing anything particularly original – even if he does it in style. It didn’t take the greatest mind of a generation to notice that consumerism had become a big thing by the time he was writing, in the mid-1980s.

While DeLillo may be walking familiar ground, I’d argue that he takes a route few others have travelled. He isn’t just listing items or habits to create the feel of advertising jingles; his rolls of words start to take on the feel of mantras, of religious chants. Most obviously when he repeats the holy trilogy: “Mastercard, Visa, American Express.” This idea is even voiced by a character called Murray – neatly enough, in the form of several jostling lists:

Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material … Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colours of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It’s just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served. This is not Tibet. Even Tibet is not Tibet any more.

But again, as Murray’s quote suggests, things aren’t straightforward. Plenty of other word lists in the first third of the book generate a similar sense of unreality, always ending in uncertainty and insubstantiality. When Babette appears on TV the occasion merits another catalogue: “It was the picture that mattered, the face in black and white, animated but also flat, distanced, sealed off, timeless.” We are told: “It was but wasn’t her.” This journey from the concrete to the ephemeral is given even more literal realisation elsewhere: “The headstones were small, tilted, pockmarked, spotted with fungus or moss, the names and dates barely legible.” Everything ends in white noise, it seems.

Except, there is more. While the lists may come to seem more insubstantial and shadowy as the first part of the book progresses, they also offer the novel’s narrator Jack Gladney something solid to cling onto, helping distract him from the thing he fears the most. They stop him thinking about death. So long as he can look at the items in the supermarket, take in the signals from the TV, and list the things he sees, he doesn’t have to dwell on mortality.

When Jack has his most intense worry about who will die first out of him and Babette, he interrupts his thought stream with that “Mastercard, Visa, American Express.” He distracts himself by looking at coffee bubbling through the tube and into the “pale globe” of his percolator: “It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world – water, metal, brown beans.”

In another episode, he tells us:

I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to grow in value and self regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me.

DeLillo’s love and flair for language unite to tell us something more about Jack, something discomforting about mortality and something profound about the way we deal with it. It may be a novel superabounding with words, but none of them are wasted.

• Don DeLillo
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WHITE NOISE

by Don DeLillo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1984

DeLillo turns a TV-movie disaster scenario into a new Book of Revelations in these pages: a very disturbing, very impressive...

DeLillo, whose recent taste for fashionable conspiracy and political/philosophical statement has detracted from his eloquent gifts, is back in top form here: sections of this new novel harken back to his best, early, most generous work—and also extend themselves further into regions of dark domestic poetry and fearful pity.

The family of Jack Gladney, an insecure academic chairing the Department of Hitler Studies at a small college, is made up of the progeny of both Jack's and wife Babette's previous marriages. In this step-family, then, Jack is happy: "Heat, noise, lights, looks, words, gestures, personalities, appliances. A colloquial density that makes family life the one medium of sense knowledge in which astonishment of heart is routinely contained." True, Jack's professional life is kitschy, in a college that also has a whole department of "American environments"—staffed by fast-talking exiles from New York City, focusing on Elvis, car crashes, UFOs, and generic foods. But his private life with Babette is blissful—clouded only by their mutual fear of it ending: who'll be the first to die, to interrupt the happiness? Then, however, about halfway through the book, there's a catastrophe, an "airborne toxic event," a chemical spill that necessitates evacuation of the college town; during the exodus Jack is momentarily exposed to the noxious air when he gets out to re-fuel the family car, an exposure which will later doom him to a premature death. And though the chemical cloud disperses, the now-strengthened fear of death—the title's "white noise"—continues to paralyze Jack and Babette both: she goes so far as to submit to sexual blackmail, to guinea-pig herself in experiments for an anti-death-anxiety drug called Dylar; Jack takes jealous revenge upon the mad scientist pushing the pills. . . while yearning desperately for the pills at the same time. True, the novel goes wrong here—opting for flashy paranoia and sci-fi, relinquishing the naturalness of the family scenes, the evocation of loneliness before death, the apocalyptic clarities of the evacuation after the spill. In the main, though, DeLillo's most human instincts prevail in this book, resulting in a wealth of lyrical, touching, and terrifying scenes: the family eating fried chicken together in their car; a visit by Babette's broken-down father; and, most indelibly, the descriptions of the "black billowing cloud, the airborne toxic event, lighted by the clear beams of seven army helicopters. They were tracking its windborne movement, keeping it in view"—to the awe of those below in cars and on foot.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1984

ISBN: 0140077022

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1984

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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by Sally Rooney

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‘A Book of Noises’ Review: Sound and Sensibility

A ll science is either physics or stamp collecting, the physicist Ernest Rutherford supposedly said, distinguishing what he saw as the pursuit of deep principles from the accumulation of endless instances. Even those who find this smug quip tiresome—it doesn’t help that it’s probably apocryphal—would concede that Caspar Henderson’s “A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous” has a definite postal air. There’s physics here, certainly, but also bits of zoology, biology, anthropology, linguistics and geology, as well as music and literature.

Which is not to say that the book isn’t interesting or sometimes stimulating. Philately will get you somewhere. Mr. Henderson, a British journalist who is remarkably cheerful for someone who writes about environmental problems and human rights as well as science, explores in 48 short essays how sound, construed broadly, shapes the universe and the life in it, from the still-detectable “ripples” of the Big Bang to the song of nightingales.

As in Mr. Henderson’s previous books, “The Book of Barely Imagined Beings” (2012) and “A New Map of Wonders” (2017), the keynote is wonder—a secular awe at the variety and complexity of the world. “Glory be to Creation for wonky things,” one chapter begins, in a play on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Pied Beauty.” Hopkins was praising “all things counter, original, spare, strange” (and the Christian God), while Mr. Henderson is talking about asymmetrical animals, such as bottom-lying flatfish that “stare up with a second eye that has yanked itself all the way round their skulls,” or certain species of owls, whose uneven ears sharpen their ability to locate sounds. To this advantage, Mr. Henderson writes, they add a beak shaped to minimize sound reflection and ears whose acuity doesn’t diminish with age. “Go, owls!” he concludes brightly.

Also praised in the “Biophony” section are amphibians (“What a piece of work is a frog. How noble in breathing, which it does through its skin”), elephants (they use their feet to “hear” vibrations in the ground) and bat echolocation (“the more one considers it, the more amazing it is”). The entries in “Cosmophony” include one on “sound in space” that contemplates how your voice would sound in the thin, cold atmosphere of Mars—quiet—and one on the ancient connections between astronomy and music. Mr. Henderson also explains “sonification,” in which scientific data is turned into sound. Though mostly an artistic experiment or public-outreach gimmick, sonification has been used for research, harnessing our ears’ ability to discern subtle changes in signals. It even allowed one astrophysicist, Wanda Díaz-Merced, to continue her career after going blind.

From “Geophony” we learn that the Northern Lights can sound like crackles, sizzles, rustles or bangs, though the idea that they sounded like anything at all was long dismissed. It takes particular atmospheric conditions to make them audible, and even then they’re barely loud enough to hear over the chatter of other tourists. Another entry, by contrast, discusses the loudest sound in recorded history (the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, whose reverberations looped the Earth for five days) and one of the loudest ever on Earth (the Chicxulub asteroid, death knell for the dinosaurs).

Mr. Henderson picked a tricky form for “A Book of Noises.” It takes a strong descriptive skill to make a mosaic of eclectic observations cohere, and his prose isn’t always up to the task. Apart from the occasional crisp phrase that refreshes the familiar (“thunder is the sound of exploding air”), his style is low-key, heavy on quotation and inclined to a cozy jokiness. (“There may be only around 300 different kinds of pasta, but there seem to be almost no end of possibilities” for musical instruments; the human brain is a “wobbly blancmange” pudding.) The result is that many of these heaped-up facts feel like novelties rather than revelations.

Scattered among them, fortunately, are some compelling explorations of the links between sound and human experience. Hearing, not touch, is perhaps the most fundamental sense, Mr. Henderson suggests. The inner ear reaches full size halfway through human gestation, so “hearing begins . . . before the distinction between self and other has formed.” What’s more, humans are apparently uniquely good at rhythm, the only creatures to both generate and dance to complex songs. Mr. Henderson nicely brings out the pull of shared rhythm, whether the lilt of a nursery rhyme or the elastic syncopation of jazz, which a drummer describes to him as feeling like “plasticine.”

This experience of self melting into sound elicits some of Mr. Henderson’s best passages. In a fascinating chapter on bells, he writes that the toll of church bells “bouncing off the curves of the land” around his grandparents’ village in the Hampshire hills of England “seemed to both describe and express the place, and I came to associate it with openness and joy—a sense of a presence deeply interfused.” At such moments, he observes, sound can also seem almost like a thing in itself, “like a perfume or a mist illuminated with golden light.”

These aren’t just fine feelings, Mr. Henderson insists. As the Earth changes and species die out along with their distinctive noises, listening is a meaningful act. It can help us monitor the health of ecosystems, he suggests, and it shows how tightly we are tied to the world. “It has never been more important to pay attention,” he writes.

We should all look and listen carefully, but “attention” has become like “mindfulness,” a low-effort virtue that rewards merely having the right thoughts. It makes a pretty modest rallying cry, more polite murmur than clarion call.

Mr. Farrington is a former editor at Harper’s and the Journal.

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TOO MUCH NOISE - ENGLISH - CHILDREN'S STORY

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