- Tags:: #📚Books, [[Forecasting]] - Author:: [[Daniel Kahneman]] - Liked:: #4/5 - Link:: [Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise:_A_Flaw_in_Human_Judgment) - Source date:: [[2021-05-18]] - Read date:: [[2021-08-01]] - Cover:: ![[Pasted image 20220223074003.png|100]] ## 18. Better Judges for Better Judgements There are different scales to self-measure your tendency to engage in careful thought (System 2) vs. impulsive (System 1). It was interesting to me the "need-for-cognition scale": e.g., if you avoid movie reviews with a spoiler alert, you probably have a high need for cognition. (p. 233) Intuition is the enemy of an open mind: >The only measure of cognitive style or personality that they found to predict forecasting performance was (…) developed by psychology professor Jonathan Baron to measure "[[actively open-minded thinking]]." To be actively open-minded is to **actively search for information that contradicts your preexisting hypotheses** (…). They disagree with the proposition that (…) "intuition is the best guide in making decisions." (p. 234) ^7e191a > We tend to put more trust in people who trust themselves than we do in those who show their doubts. (p. 228) ^77dac1 >People often tend to trust and like leaders who are firm and clear and who seem to know, immediately and deep in their bones, what is right. Such leaders inspire confidence. (p. 235) ^7fb329 >But the evidence suggests that if the goal is to reduce error, it is better for leaders (and others) to remain open to counterarguments and to know that they might be wrong. (p. 235) ^1377bc >If they end up being decisive, it is at the end of a process, not at the start. (p. 235) >**The personality of people with excellent judgment may not fit the generally accepted stereotype of a decisive leader**. (p.235) As Francisco Umbral already said in [[📖 Mortal y Rosa]]: > Mueve más una mentira firme que una verdad pensativa (p. 221). Related: [Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?](https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men) ## 24. Structure in Hiring ### The Dangers of Interviews A bit better than flipping a coin: > …standard interviews (also called unstructured interviews to distinguish them from structured interviews(…) are not very informative. To put it more starkly, they are often useless) (p. 301) >if all you know about two candidates is that one appeared better than the other in the interview, the chances that this candidate will indeed perform better are about 56 to 61% (p. 302) ### Noise in Interviewing > There is strong evidence, for instance, that hiring recommendations are linked to impressions formed in the informal rapport-building phase of an interview (p. 304) > early perceptions are based mostly on a candidate's extraversion and verbal skills. Even the quality of a handshake is a significant predictor of hiring recommendations! (p. 304) ### The Psychology of Interviewers >Why do first impressions end up driving the outcome of a much longer interview? **One reason is that in a traditional interview, interviewers are at liberty to steer the interview in the direction they see fit** (p. 304) > …we are capable of finding logic in perfectly meaningless answers (p. 304) Another one for [[✍️ GPT-3 me va a quitar el trabajo, pero yo tengo que estar entrenando algoritmia de bajo nivel]] >One of us once witnessed a candidate making a bad impression in this exercise, clearly because of the stress of the situation: the candidate’s résumé mentioned outstanding teaching evaluations and several awards for teaching excellence. Yet the vivid impression produced by his failure in one highly artificial situation weighed more heavily in the final decision than did the abstract data about his excellent past teaching performance (p. 306) ### Improving Personnel Selection Through Structure >Google stringently enforces a rule that not all companies observe: the company makes sure that the interviewers rate the candidate separately, before they communicate with one another. Once more: aggregation works—but only if the judgments are independent (p. 307) >Google also adopted a decision hygiene strategy we haven’t yet described in detail: *structuring complex judgments*. The term structure can mean many things. As we use the term here, a structured complex judgment is defined by three principles: decomposition, independence, and delayed holistic judgment (p. 307) #### Decomposition Breaking down the decision into *mediating assessments*. >This step serves the same purpose as the identification of the subjudgments in a guideline: it focuses the judges on the important cues. Decomposition acts as a road map to specify what data is needed. And it filters out irrelevant information (p. 307) > In Google's case, there are four mediating assessments in the decomposition: general cognitive ability, leadership, cultural fit, and role-related knowledge. (Some of these assessments are then broken down into smaller components.) (p. 308) > Creating this sort of structure for a recruiting task may seem like mere common sense (...) however, **defining the key assessments gets difficult for unusual or senior positions, and this step of definition is frequently overlooked**. (p. 308) >... the importance for decision makers of "**investing in the problem definition**": spending the necessary time up front, before you meet any candidates, to agree on a clear and detailed job description. (p. 308) #### Independence Google introduced *structured behavioral interviews*. >The interviewers' task in such interviews is not to decide whether they like a candidate overall; it is to collect data about each assessment in the evaluation structure and to assign a score to the candidate on each assessment (p. 309) > there is some evidence that both interviewees and interviewers dislike structured interviews (or at least prefer unstructured ones). (p. 309) But... improves an unstructured interview significantly: > your chances of picking the better candidate with a structured interview are between 65% and 69% In addition: > Google uses other data as inputs (...). Research has shown that work sample tests are among the best predictors of on-the-job performance. (p. 309) #### Delayed holistic judgement > Despite the famously data-driven culture of this company, and despite all the evidence that a mechanical combination of data outperforms a clinical one, the final hiring decision is not mechanical (...) while they are not mechanical, Google's final hiring decisions are anchored on the average score assigned by the four interviewers. They are also informed by the underlying evidence. In other words, **Google allows judgment and intuition in its decision-making process only after** all the evidence has been collected and analyzed. (p. 310).