Humans

Behavioural scientists Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony explain why “noise” in professional judgements harms everything from criminal justice to medical treatments

Humans

16 June 2021

By Graham Lawton

Siegfried Layda/Getty Images
If you have ever jumped to the wrong conclusion, made a terrible mistake thanks to your inbuilt biases or been subtly nudged back to your senses, then you are (a) human and (b) already on personal terms with the work of Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein. Thanks to their academic and popular writing, the world is now very familiar with what are collectively called “cognitive biases” – systematic errors in human thinking – and ways to correct them.
Sunstein co-wrote the highly influential book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness with Richard Thaler, while Kahneman popularised the work that won him the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 with his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Sibony is the author of You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How biases distort decision-making and what you can do to fight them.
You may think that, in no small part thanks to their efforts, the swamp of human fallibility has been well and truly drained by now. But that would be yet another mistake. Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein say there is an even more important source of warped decision-making. The three have banded together in a behavioural science supergroup to draw attention to what they call “noise” – persistent inconsistencies in professional judgements that lead to bad outcomes in all walks of life.
Kahneman and Sibony spoke to New Scientist about the group’s new book Noise: A flaw in human judgment (Little, Brown Spark in the UK; William Collins in the US). Sunstein was due to join the conversation, but was called away at the last minute by his … More

By Gregory Wakeman

(L-R) Lucius Hoyos as Noah, Gina Rodriguez as Jill, Ariana Greenblatt as MatildaPeter H. Stranks/NETFLIX
In the dystopian sci-fi movie Awake, everyone on Earth suddenly loses the ability to sleep, plunging the world into hysteria.
As scientists race to find a cure, ex-soldier Jill Adams (Gina Rodriguez) discovers that her young daughter Matilda (Ariana Greenblatt) might just possess the means to save mankind.
 Awake’s compelling premise is enough to make the opening of the film enjoyable. Director Mark Raso slowly cranks up the tension – there are some unsettling set pieces, and the film doesn’t waste time trying to explain the phenomenon. Instead, the slow reveal of information does enough to keep you hooked.Advertisement
Unfortunately, though, Awake soon goes off the rails. Raso is constantly trying to create the same mindset of those who are unable to sleep in the viewers, but it just makes things increasingly confusing.
It also doesn’t help that, by only following Jill’s relationship with Matilda and her son Noah (Lucius Hoyos), Awake is too contained. We learn very little about what’s going on across the world, so when symptoms suddenly escalate and humanity descends into anarchy, it has very little impact.
But what would actually happen if you suddenly couldn’t sleep?

Alastair McLean at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who specialises in sleep deprivation, says its biggest impact is on interpersonal interactions, as people quickly become quite irritable.
“In terms of performance, one of the most obvious things that happens are microsleeps,” says McLean, in which people fall asleep for up to 30 seconds and can’t remember what happened. “They can occur after 24 hours.”
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There is also cognitive slowing, which sees people taking longer to make decisions, and cognitive rigidity, in which individuals can only think about things in one fixed way. Loss of motivation, paranoia, memory and balance issues, mood changes and visual problems can also occur, while some people experience hallucinations and even speech difficulties.
In 1963, 17-year-old Randy Gardner set the record for the longest time a human had gone without sleep, staying awake for 11 days and 25 minutes. Finland’s Toimi Soini and the UK’s Maureen Weston and Tony Wright have allegedly beaten this time, but none of them were studied as closely as Gardner.
Studies of sleep deprivation on animals have also proven to be revealing. “In 1989, Allan Rechtschaffen and his Chicago group studied rats that were sleep deprived. After two to three weeks, they started to die,” says McLean. “You saw the same pattern in all of them. They began to eat more and more as the sleep loss went on. Despite that, they had a fall in body weight.”

A 2020 study by researchers at Harvard Medical School on sleep deprivation in fruit flies also provided the same outcome. The more they didn’t sleep, the greater the increase in a molecule in the gut known as reactive oxidative species.
“If they gave the fruit flies materials to offset the effects of this, they didn’t die,” says McLean. “We’ve been looking for the effects of sleep deprivation in the brain. It looks, though, that it’s the gut that may be critical when it comes to survival.”
Based on the trailer for Awake, McLean agrees that it looks accurate in its use of disorientation and even hallucinations, but says it appears to exaggerate the problems and even speed up the timeframe in which they occur.
By doing just, that Awake strains to repeat the success of thrillers like A Quiet Place and Bird Box. But not only does it lack the ingenuity, tension and star power of these films, it is too aimless, meandering and lacking in heart to come close.
Awake is now available on Netflix .

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Ilka & Franz/Getty Images
ALMOST every month, a new piece of research emerges linking diets high in processed “junk” foods with obesity and poor health. It isn’t yet clear if the relationship is causal, and if so, what the mechanisms behind it may be. But insights are starting to emerge from trials that compare diets that are based on either ultra-processed foods or wholefoods, yet are carefully matched for nutrients in all other ways.
The links need investigating as a matter of urgency. If these processed foods really do carry intrinsic health risks, it could mean that official advice about healthy eating has been … More

By Vijaysree Venkatraman

Hakeem Oluseyi, speaking at NASA’s Earth Day event in 2017NASA/Joel Kowsky
A Quantum Life: My unlikely journey from the street to the stars
Hakeem Oluseyi and Joshua Horwitz
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THEY called him “the professor” because, by the age of 10, he was already reading every book he could lay his hands on. In the sixth grade, he scored 162 on an IQ test at school. Still, by the time he was in his teens, the certified genius was dealing weed and carrying a gun for protection.
“If anyone had told me I’d grow up to be an actual professor at MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Cape Town, I wouldn’t have believed them,” writes astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi in his inspiring memoir A Quantum Life. The book follows his “unlikely journey from the street to the stars”.
Born James Edward Plummer Jr, Oluseyi was often uprooted as a child, and learned to survive in some of the toughest urban neighbourhoods across the US. He also lived in rural Mississippi, a state where older African American people still addressed white people, including children, as “ma’am” and “sir”.
“Albert Einstein and I would have been friends,” he recalls thinking when he read about the scientist. Einstein, too, was told to “stop staring into space”, and his family moved often. He also featured when Oluseyi taught himself to program at high school. He coded concepts of Einstein’s theory of special relativity into a game and won first place in physics in the Mississippi State Science Fair.
To fund college, he joined the navy. But after two years, he was discharged with atopic dermatitis, which barred him from serving on ships. An old friend encouraged him to enrol at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. The pair sold drugs there and dropped out, but Oluseyi re-enrolled.
This time, David Teal, a white, Harvard-educated professor in the historically Black college, took an interest in Oluseyi, urging him to attend a meeting of African American physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The experience felt like an “alien abduction”, writes Oluseyi, but it gave him a clear goal: to apply to graduate programmes.
“Every year,” he writes, “the Stanford physics department took in one student like me – a diversity admission who wasn’t at the same level of academic preparation as the rest of the class.” It would take a lot more than hard work alone to earn his PhD there, but he was up for the challenge (and later a change of name).
“It would take a lot more than hard work to earn his PhD, but Hakeem Oluseyi was up for the challenge”
Besides, his doctoral adviser was Arthur B. C. Walker. The African American astrophysicist, whose telescopes gave unprecedented views of the sun, had mentored students from under-represented groups in physics. Sally Ride, the first US woman in space, was his first doctoral student.
Walker told Oluseyi that some still believed that while Black scientists could build ingenious gadgets, they weren’t gifted enough to make insights in pure physics or in the analyses of data and observations. While Walker got credit for his novel technology to study the sun, doubters said he had few pure science publications. Oluseyi worked with his mentor to seal his legacy before Walker died in 2001.
Today, Oluseyi is one of a handful of Black astrophysicists, but he has been working to change that. In 2008, he received a grant from the Kellogg Foundation to set up a mentoring programme for Black astronomy students in South Africa. They were brilliant, but felt second-class at university, says Oluseyi. He shared his struggles as he taught the students advanced topics. They passed in the top 20 per cent of the class.
South Africa will eventually co-host the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the world’s most powerful radio telescope cluster. Four of Oluseyi’s students are in the front row of a SKA team photo. He wasn’t there, but says “believe me, I’m standing tall and proud… next to them”.
Vijaysree Venkatraman is a Boston-based science journalist

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The Art Of Data is explored by statistician David Spiegelhalter and data artist Stefanie Posavec at Cheltenham Science Festival, in a talk that will be live-streamed on YouTube on 13 June at 9.15pm BST.

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The Glitter in the Green catches the eye of naturalist Jon Dunn, who writes about his travels the length and breadth of the Americas in search of hummingbirds, from woodlands to deserts, mangrove swamps to sub-polar islands.Advertisement
The National Museum of Computing
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The Polish Cyclometer, an Enigma-cracking machine built by Polish mathematicians, is the subject of a virtual talk by Jerry McCarthy at the UK’s National Museum of Computing on 13 June at 5pm BST and 14 June at 11am BST. More

By Laura Spinney

Rocio Montoya
YOU have probably seen the annual rankings of the world’s cities by “liveability” or “quality of life”. It is intriguing to discover which come out top – and which bottom. After all, most of us have skin in this game: more than half of people around the world live in urban environments, and that number is growing. But you may also have wondered what “quality of life” really means. Which qualities? Whose life?
These same questions occupy Anu Ramaswami. Trained initially as a chemical engineer, she is now a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her research focuses on what we can do to improve the urban environment, and she works closely with US cities as well as with the United Nations and national governments. It is fiendishly difficult to compare cities, she says – or even, for that matter, to define them.
Ramaswami wants to persuade people that cities aren’t concrete jungles that stop abruptly at their official limits, but complex, dynamic systems that extend much further and, like living organisms, have their own metabolism. Only by thinking of them in this way can we start to make them more liveable, she says.
Laura Spinney: Urbanisation is accelerating as global population grows. Is that a good thing?
Anu Ramaswami: Many people point to cities as villains. I prefer a more nuanced narrative that says cities offer an opportunity for innovation. This typically generates more wealth and, to some extent, more well-being, but also inequality, which has its own implications for well-being. More than 90 … More

By Annalee Newitz

Helen Sessions/Alamy
IN LATE May, Amazon bought 97-year-old movie studio MGM for $8.45 billion. Although that is a huge amount of money, there is something almost routine about the transaction at this point. MGM owns some of the rights to James Bond and a few other popular franchises, so there is talk about how big tech is about to ruin more nice things.
Obviously, Amazon is trying to lure more customers to MGM’s catalogue, and sure, it is possible that Amazon will ruin our love for Agent 007 with a romcom about wacky high jinks when James Bond marries a surveillance drone. … More

By Simon Ings

FOR most of us, buildings are functional. We live, work and store things in them. They are as much a part of us as the nest is a part of a community of termites.
Were this all there was to say about buildings, architectural historian Barnabas Calder might have found his book easier to write. He is asking “how humanity’s access to energy has shaped the world’s buildings through history”.
Had his account remained so straightforward, we might have ended up with an eye-opening mathematical description of the increased energy available (derived from wood, charcoal and straw, then from coal and then from oil) and how it transformed and now, through global warming, threatens our civilisation.
But, of course, buildings are also aspirational acts of creative expression. However debased it seems, the most ordinary structure is the product of an artist of sorts, and to get built at all, it must be bankrolled by people who are (relatively) wealthy and powerful.
This was as true of Uruk – perhaps the first city, founded in the area now called Iraq around 3200 BC – as it is in Shenzhen, the Chinese former fishing hamlet that is now a city of nearly 13 million people.
While the economics of the built environment are crucial, they don’t make sense without sociology and even psychology. This is particularly the case when it comes to what Calder calls “the mutual stirring, the hysteria between architect and client” that gave us St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and the New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China, the world’s biggest building by floor area.
Calder knows this: “What different societies chose to do with [their] energy surplus has produced endless variation and brilliance.” So if his account seems to wander, this is why: architecture isn’t a wholly economic activity, and certainly not a narrowly rational one.
At the end of an insightful, often impassioned journey through the history of buildings, Calder does his best to explain how architecture can address the climate emergency. But his advice and encouragement vanishes under the enormity of the crisis. The construction and running of buildings account for 39 per cent of human greenhouse gas emissions. Concrete is the most used material on Earth after water. And while there is plenty of sustainability talk in construction sectors, Calder finds precious little sign of real change. We demolish too often, build too often and use unsustainable materials.
There may be solutions, but we won’t find many clues in the archaeological record. As Calder points out, “entire traditions of impressive tent-like architecture are known mainly from pictures rather than physical remnants”. The remains of civilisation before the days of fossil fuel only offer a partial guide to future architecture. Perhaps we should look to existing temporary structures – even to some novel ones used in refugee camps.
Rather paradoxically, Calder’s love poem to buildings left me thinking about the Mongols, for whom a walled city was a symbol of bondage and barbarism. They would have no more settled in a fixed house than become enslaved. And their empire, which covered 23 million square kilometres, demolished more architecture than it raised.

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