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If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage. Power corrupts, and therefore one of the secrets of a good society is that power should always be open to criticism. A good society should provide sinew for revolt as well as for power.
The Rise of the Meritocracy
Michael Young
When people are introduced to clinical and mechanical prediction, they want to know how the two compare. How good is human judgment, relative to a formula? The question had been asked before, but it attracted much attention only in 1954, when Paul Meehl, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, published a book titled Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. Meehl reviewed twenty studies in which a clinical judgment was pitted against a mechanical prediction for such outcomes as academic success and psychiatric prognosis. He reached the strong conclusion that simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment. Meehl discovered that clinicians and other professionals are distressingly weak in what they often see as their unique strength: the ability to integrate information.
Noise
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein
A frequent misconception about unwanted variability in judgments is that it doesn’t matter, because random errors supposedly cancel one another out. Certainly, positive and negative errors in a judgment about the same case will tend to cancel one another out, and we will discuss in detail how this property can be used to reduce noise. But noisy systems do not make multiple judgments of the same case. They make noisy judgments of different cases. If one insurance policy is overpriced and another is underpriced, pricing may on average look right, but the insurance company has made two costly errors. If two felons who both should be sentenced to five years in prison receive sentences of three years and seven years, justice has not, on average, been done. In noisy systems, errors do not cancel out. They add up.
Noise
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein
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