Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The authors of "Noise" say that "Noise is not a prominent problem. It is rarely discussed, and it is certainly less salient than bias." (page 368) The late quality guru, W. Edwards Deming and thousands of his students, devoted a great deal of effort to identifying and reducing noise in systems. Their term for noise was "common causes of variation," by which Deming meant the many variables normally active in a system, and which Deming thought accounted for 94 % of the system's variation. (Deming, "Out of the Crisis," 1986, p. 315) Reducing the variation in common causes promised the biggest payoff in improvement. The remaining six per cent of variation Deming assigned to "special causes of variation," what I think Kahneman and company call "bias." In Deming's system, special causes are not usually operating in a process which cause it to be biased producing defective products and judgements. Deming argued that special causes must first be detected and eliminated before managers took up the difficult, but rewarding task, of reducing common causes of variation. Readers who find reading "Noise" a hard slog may find many similar ideas explained in plain English and simple statistics in Deming classic book.