Noise summary

Let’s do another thought experiment, one that takes place at a carnival. Specifically, at a shooting arcade.

You and a friend, BB rifles in hand, have just fired several metal pellets at paper targets hanging at the far end of the range. You’re both terrible shots, but in different ways.

A judge deciding bail faces a mighty responsibility. Should she keep a defendant in jail pending trial, or let him go?

If she wrongly denies bail, the defendant will lose his freedom and perhaps his job. His family might even lose their home. None of this loss will have served justice. On the other hand, if she wrongly grants bail, he may flee and worse, commit another crime.

You might have noticed that blinks often begin with a story.

We sketch out a time and place, an event that involves a character, someone with a goal and obstacles to overcome. We do this because the human mind loves a story, and information that works within a story tends to stick.

Before moving on, let’s just quickly recap what we’ve learned so far, which is this: Wherever there’s human judgment, there’ll be noise and, sometimes, that noise can have alarming, life-changing consequences.

So, that naturally leads to the question: What can we do about it? How do we turn down the noise?

So far, we’ve spent a fair bit of time talking about judges and the random and occasionally inexplicable variability in the sentences they hand out. The random quality of this injustice didn’t escape the notice of Marvin E. Frankel, a US District Judge.

Early in his career, Frankel realized that he could, for example, send a convicted bank robber to prison for up to 25 years, or he could choose a sentence of one day. The judgment, Frankel saw, ultimately depended on his own views, predilections, and biases.

Imagine you’re on an operating table, about to go under the knife. Just before you nod off under the influence of a general anesthetic, the lead surgeon steps over to the sink. She lathers her hands up with soap and then places them under the hot water. With that one simple act, she has prevented an unknowable number of pathogens from entering your body.

We can do much the same with noise. By adopting principles we’ll call decision hygiene, we can make our world substantially less noisy.

In 1984, Judge Frankel was victorious. Congress enacted the Sentencing Reform Act and soon after instituted strict sentencing guidelines based on an analysis of 10,000 real cases. Under the new rules, judges could only consider the crime and the defendant’s criminal history. The judge would assign a numerical value to each and the resulting score dictated the range of possible sentences.

As a result, noise in sentencing plummeted.