Quotes About Variability

My problem is that what I like changes from week to week. Even the stuff in my suitcase right now I don't like any more.

Permanence is but a word of degrees.

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.

vicissitudes might

Noise is mostly a by-product of our uniqueness, of our "judgment personality.

The truth is that small schools are not better on average; they are simply more variable.

It is very likely that intrinsic variability in the functioning of the brain also affects the quality of our judgments in ways that we cannot possibly hope to control.

We have defined noise as undesirable variability in judgments of the same problem. Since singular problems are never exactly repeated, this definition does not apply to them. After all, history is only run once. You will never be able to compare Obama's decision to send

The widespread misunderstanding of randomness sometimes has significant consequences.

System noise, that is, unwanted variability in judgments that should ideally be identical, can create rampant injustice, high economic costs, and errors of many kinds.

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing the assessment than on the performance being assessed.

Personnel decisions are noisy. Interviewers of job candidates make widely different assessments of the same people. Performance ratings of the same employees are also highly variable and depend more on the person doing

System noise is inconsistency, and inconsistency damages the credibility of the system.

judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.

Variability in judgments is also expected and welcome in a competitive situation in which the best judgments will be rewarded.

But our focus is on judgments in which variability is undesirable. System noise is a problem of systems, which are organizations, not markets.

Level noise is variability in the average level of judgments by different judges. Pattern noise is variability in judges' responses to particular cases.

Life, however, is usually a between-subjects experiment

Wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than we think.

Averaging is mathematically guaranteed to reduce noise:

The notion that any one person can describe 'what really happened' is an absurdity. If ten - or a hundred - people witness an event, there will be ten - or a hundred - different versions of what took place.

This was a rational reflection of the fact that experimentation increases the variability of results.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.