Hello everyone, today we start to introduce Daniel Kahneman 's two classic books " Thinking Fast and Slow " and "Noise". My interpretation is to integrate the contents of the two books together. Next, my series will be divided into three parts.
First of all, we need to clarify some basic concepts, such as what judgment is, what is the essence of judgment, the type of judgment, etc. Secondly, we will share two typical errors in human decision-making and judgment: bias and noise, and the root causes of bias and noise. Finally, we will share how to reduce bias and reduce the impact of noise, as well as specific methods and principles for making wise decisions.
Before introducing in detail how to improve judgment, we need to understand: What is judgment? Studies have found that our brains make a judgment every 5 seconds. Judgment is a thinking activity. According to the definition of "judgment", it is the thinking process of determining whether something exists or whether it has certain attributes. It is one of the basic forms of thinking. There are many different types of judgment: analytical judgment, comprehensive judgment, singular judgment, universal judgment, general judgment, universal judgment, rational judgment, intuitive judgment, etc. So what kind of judgment are we going to discuss here?
For example, the sun will rise tomorrow, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to 180 degrees, 1+1=2, and the swan is white. These are all judgments, but these judgments are unlikely to cause disagreement. Kahneman calls them: declarative judgments. This is not the type of judgment we want to discuss. Their certainty is very high, or they are purely logical judgments. For another example, I like a certain star, a certain director's work, a certain mobile phone or clothing brand. These are also judgments, but these judgments only express my personal taste and opinions and have nothing to do with other people. In other words, these judgments are highly arbitrary. This is not the type of judgment we want to discuss.
The judgments mentioned above either do not have any differences and the judgments are very certain; or the judgments are just expressions of personal tastes and opinions, and the judgments are arbitrary and there is no way to evaluate the quality of the judgments. The "judgment" we are going to discuss here is somewhere between them. On the one hand, it is based on facts or calculations. On the other hand, different judgment subjects must have different opinions on the issue, and the conclusion is uncertain, but it is not a random judgment similar to taste or opinion. Meeting these two criteria is our judgment worthy of analysis.
clarifies the scope of judgment, so what exactly is judgment? Kahneman said judgment is a measurement that uses the human brain as a tool. Judgment is a kind of measurement, which means that the purpose of judgment is not to express oneself, highlight personality and position, nor to form a consensus, or to persuade others. The purpose of judgment is to pursue accuracy. In order to arrive at an accurate judgment, it is very important to understand the purpose of this judgment. Because in daily life, we often make judgments and decisions to demonstrate our personality, authority, or to cater to others and reach consensus. These understandings of judgment are incorrect. The purpose of judgment is to obtain accurate answers.
Therefore, Kahneman describes judgment as a kind of measurement, as if there is a ruler in our brain, and then compares it with the object of judgment, and then makes a judgment. For example, when a judge sentences a criminal, he assigns a value to the sentence based on the degree of the crime. This process is like having a ruler in his hand. For different criminal acts, the judge only needs to measure according to this standard ruler to make his own judgment.
But there may be various problems with the ruler in everyone's brain, so various errors will occur when making strategies. The deviation is like the scale of the ruler is wrong, so there is always an error in what is measured. The noise is like our hands shaking when measuring, causing errors in the measurement results. For example, this judge is always biased against black brothers and sentences black criminals more severely. This is a problem with this judge’s ruler, which creates a deviation.Noise is like a judge having a fight with a white young man in the morning, so today he is more harsh on the white man in sentencing. This kind of error is noise.
Ok, now we understand what the judgment we are talking about is, and the essence of judgment is measurement. Next, let’s take a look at the two types of judgments: predictive judgments and evaluative judgments. Predicting what the temperature will be tomorrow, predicting the results of the US presidential election , predicting Qatar World Cup champions, these are all predictive judgments. Predictive judgments can be verified and can be verified with future factual results. Predictive judgments are essentially factual judgments. For example, when the World Cup is over, we will know at a glance who the champion is, whose prediction was right, and whose prediction was wrong.
But there is another kind of judgment which is evaluative judgment. This kind of judgment has no objective standard to verify, and it often contains subjective factors. This kind of judgment is a value judgment. In philosophy, Hume proposed the famous "dichotomy between fact judgment and value judgment". Value judgment depends on personal values and preferences, and value conclusions cannot be derived from fact judgment. For example, judges in wine competitions grade, professors grade essays, management evaluates employees' work performance, and judges sentence criminals. These judgments are evaluative judgments.
In short, there are objective test standards for predictive judgments, but there are no objective test standards for evaluative judgments. Although the judge has legal provisions as a basis, the amount of sentencing also depends on the judge's attitude towards the criminal and the judge's understanding of the legal provisions. Therefore, evaluative judgments depend to a certain extent on the values and preferences of the judge.
However, in daily life, the boundary between the two judgments is not clearly defined. To make a judgment, we often need to make a predictive judgment based on facts, and then make an evaluative judgment based on the predicted results. Make value choices based on facts. But many people's judgment is actually the opposite. Make a value judgment first, and then find facts to support your opinion.
For example, if my girlfriend didn’t receive a gift on her birthday, she said, “You don’t love me anymore.” Not only was there no gift this time, but there was also no gift last Christmas. The girlfriend first makes a value judgment and then finds evidence to prove her judgment. So Kahneman reminds us that a good decision should not confuse predictive judgments and evaluative judgments, let alone get them in the wrong order. When we make predictive judgments, these judgments should not be affected by your hopes, fears, preferences and value orientations.
But no matter what, there are biases and noises in both judgments. So how do these noises and biases arise? Kahneman said that in addition to people’s subjective values and preferences, there is another very important reason: objective ignorance.
What is objective ignorance? How does objective ignorance affect our decision-making judgment? For more exciting content, please continue to follow me. If you think the content is good, you can support me by long pressing the like button. See you in the next issue.
