The Science of Bad Decisions
Freakonomics, is one of my favourite series of books, blogs and audio podcasts. As the authors proclaim, they look at “the hidden side of everything.”
So imagine my delight when I found a recent podcast that examined how decisions by adjudicators (baseball umpires, judges and bank loan officers) can be affected by totally random factors such as the the order in which they are made and time of day.
The problem is, people don’t really understand randomness. They understand that, if you flip a coin, the odds of landing heads or tails are 50/50. This means that, out of . . . [more]