A Conversation with Daniel Kahneman About “Noise” - By Evan Nesterak - Behavioral Scientist
On the one hand, bias is an average error. On the other hand, it’s a psychological mechanism, and it’s a psychological observation. There are mechanisms that cause systematic errors in people’s judgments and in people’s decisions, and those errors are called biases. And it’s basically a psychological mechanism that explains events inside the individual—why an individual is inclined to make one mistake or another.
Sometimes the rules can be checklists. It doesn’t even have to be a computation. The Apgar score, how to decide whether infants are healthy, is a rule. And it eliminates noise almost perfectly among physicians.
How did they come up with the Apgar score? Why does it work?