Superforecasting – the thing that TalkTalk didn’t do

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I have just been reading Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. The book has attracted much attention and enthusiasm in the press. It makes a bold claim that some people, superforecasters, though inexpert in the conventional sense, are possessed of the ability to make predictions with a striking degree of accuracy, that those individuals exploit a strategy for forecasting applicable even to the least structured evidence, and that the method can be described and learned. The book summarises results of a study sponsored by US intelligence agencies as part of the Good Judgment Project but, be warned, there is no study data in the book.

I haven’t found any really good distinction between forecasting and prediction so I might swap between the two words arbitrarily here.

What was being predicted?

The forecasts/ predictions in question were all in the field of global politics and economics. For example, a question asked in January 2011 was:

Will Italy restructure or default on its debt by 31 December 2011?

This is a question that invited a yes/ no answer. However, participants were encouraged to answer with a probability, a number between 0% and 100% inclusive. If they were certain of the outcome they could answer 100%, if certain that it would not occur, 0%. The participants were allowed, I think encouraged, to update and re-update their forecasts at any time. So, as far as I can see, a forecaster who predicted 60% for Italian debt restructuring in January 2011 could revise that to 0% in December, even up to the 30th. Each update was counted as a separate forecast.

The study looked for “Goldilocks” problems, not too difficult, not to easy but just right.

Bruno de Finetti was very sniffy about using the word “prediction” in this context and preferred the word “prevision”. It didn’t catch on.

Who was studied?

The study was conducted by means of a tournament among volunteers. I gather that the participants wanted to be identified and thereby personally associated with their scores. Contestants had to be college graduates and, as a preliminary, had to complete a battery of standard cognitive and general knowledge tests designed to characterise their given capabilities. The competitors in general fell in the upper 30 percent of the general population for intelligence and knowledge. When some book reviews comment on how the superforecasters included housewives and unemployed factory workers I think they give the wrong impression. This was a smart, self-selecting, competitive group with an interest in global politics. As far as I can tell, backgrounds in mathematics, science and computing were typical. It is true that most were amateurs in global politics.

With such a sampling frame, of what population is it representative? The authors recognise that problem though don’t come up with an answer.

How measured?

Forecasters were assessed using Brier scores. I fear that Brier scores fail to be intuitive, are hard to understand and raise all sorts of conceptual difficulties. I don’t feel that they are sufficiently well explained, challenged or justified in the book. Suppose that a competitor predicts a probability p for the Italian default of 60%. Rewrite this as a probability in the range 0 to 1 for convenience, 0.6 If the competitor accepts finite additivity then the probability of “no default” is 1- 0.6 = 0.4. Now suppose that outcomes f are coded as 1 when confirmed and 0 when disconfirmed. That means that if a default occurs then f ( default ) = 1 and f (no default ) = 0. If there is no default then f ( default ) = 0 and f (no default ) = 1. It’s not easy to get. We then take the difference between the ps and the fs, calculate the square of the differences and sum them. This is illustrated below for “no default” which yields a Brier score of 0.72.

Event p f ( p – f ) 2
Default 0.6 0 0.36
No default 0.4 1 0.36
Sum 1.0 0.72

Suppose we were dealing with a fair coin toss. Nobody would criticise a forecasting probability of 50% for heads and 50% for tails. The long run Brier score would be 0.5 (think about it). Brier scores were averaged for each competitor and used as the basis of ranking them. If a competitor updated a prediction then every fresh update was counted as an individual prediction and each prediction was scored. More on this later. An average of 0.5 would be similar to a chimp throwing darts at a target. That is about how well expert professional forecasters had performed in a previous study. The lower the score the better. Zero would be perfect foresight.

I would have liked to have seen some alternative analyses and I think that a Hosmer-Lemeshow statistic or detailed calibration study would in some ways have been more intuitive and yielded more insight.

What the results?

The results are not given in the book, only some anecdotes. Competitor Doug Lorch, a former IBM programmer it says, answered 104 questions in the first year and achieved a Brier score of 0.22. He was fifth on the drop list. The top 58 competitors, the superforecasters, had an average Brier score of 0.25 compared with 0.37 for the balance. In the second year, Lorch joined a team of other competitors identified as superforecasters and achieved an average Brier score of 0.14. He beat a prediction market of traders dealing in futures in the outcomes, the book says by 40% though it does not explain what that means.

I don’t think that I find any of that, in itself, persuasive. However, there is a limited amount of analysis here on the (old) Good Judgment Project website. Despite the reservations I have set out above there are some impressive results, in particular this chart.

The competitors’ Brier scores were measured over the first 25 questions. The 100 with the lowest scores were identified, the blue line. The chart then shows the performance of that same group of competitors over the subsequent 175 questions. Group membership is not updated. It is the same 100 competitors as performed best at the start who are plotted across the whole 200 questions. The red line shows the performance of the worst 100 competitors from the first 25 questions, again with the same cohort plotted for all 200 questions.

Unfortunately, it is not raw Brier scores that are plotted but standardised scores. The scores have been adjusted so that the mean is zero and standard deviation one. That actually adds nothing to the chart but obscures somewhat how it is interpreted. I think that violates all Shewhart’s rules of data presentation.

That said, over the first 25 questions the blue cohort outperform the red. Then that same superiority of performance is maintained over the subsequent 175 questions. We don’t know how much is the difference in performance because of the standardisation. However, the superiority of performance is obvious. If that is a mere artefact of the data then I am unable to see how. Despite the way that data is presented and my difficulties with Brier scores, I cannot think of any interpretation other than there being a cohort of superforecasters who were, in general, better at prediction than the rest.

Conclusions

Tetlock comes up with some tentative explanations as to the consistent performance of the best. In particular he notes that the superforecasters updated their predictions more frequently than the remainder. Each of those updates was counted as a fresh prediction. I wonder how much of the variation in Brier scores is accounted for by variation in the time of making the forecast? If superforecasters are simply more active than the rest, making lots of forecasts once the outcome is obvious then the result is not very surprising.

That may well not be the case as the book contends that superforecasters predicting 300 days in the future did better than the balance of competitors predicting 100 days. However, I do feel that the variation arising from the time a prediction was made needs to be taken out of the data so that the variation in, shall we call it, foresight can be visualised. The book is short on actual analysis and I would like to have seen more. Even in a popular management book.

The data on the website on purported improvements from training is less persuasive, a bit of an #executivetimeseries.

Some of the recommendations for being a superforecaster are familiar ideas from behavoural psychology. Be a fox not a hedgehog, don’t neglect base rates, be astute to the distinction between signal and noise, read widely and richly, etc..

Takeaways

There was one unanticipated and intriguing result. The superforecasters updated their predictions not only frequently but by fine degrees, perhaps from 61% to 62%. I think that some further analysis is required to show that that is not simply an artefact of the measurement. Because Brier scores have a squared term they would be expected to punish the variation in large adjustments.

However, taking the conclusion at face value, it has some important consequences for risk assessment which often proceeds by broadly granular ranking on a rating scale of 1 to 5, say. The study suggests that the best predictions will be those where careful attention is paid to fine gradations in probability.

Of course, continual updating of predictions is essential to even the most primitive risk management though honoured more often in the breach than the observance. I shall come back to the significance of this for risk management in a future post.

There is also an interesting discussion about making predictions in teams but I shall have to come back to that another time.

The amateurs out-performed the professionals on global politics. I wonder if the same result would have been encountered against experts in structural engineering.

And TalkTalk? They forgot, pace Stanley Baldwin, that the hacker will always get through.

Professor Tetlock invites you to join the programme at http://www.goodjudgment.com.

The Iron Law at Volkswagen

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So Michael Horn, VW’s US CEO has made a “sincere apology” for what went on at VW.

And like so many “sincere apologies” he blamed somebody else. “My understanding is that it was a couple of software engineers who put these in.”

As an old automotive hand I have always been very proud of the industry. I have held it up as a model of efficiency, aesthetic aspiration, ambition, enlightenment and probity. My wife will tell you how many times I have responded to tales of workplace chaos with “It couldn’t happen in a car plant”. Fortunately we don’t own a VW but I still feel betrayed by this. Here’s why.

A known risk

Everybody knew from the infancy of emissions testing, which came along at about the same time as the adoption of engine management systems, the risks of a “cheat device”. It was obvious to all that engineers might be tempted to manoeuvre a recalcitrant engine through a challenging emissions test by writing software so as to detect test conditions and thereon modify performance.

In the better sort of motor company, engineers were left in no doubt that this was forbidden and the issue was heavily policed with code reviews and process surveillance.

This was not something that nobody saw coming, not a blind spot of risk identification.

The Iron Law

I wrote before about the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Decision taking executives in an organisation try not to pass information upwards. That will only result in interference and enquiry. Supervisory boards are well aware of this phenomenon because, during their own rise to the board, they themselves were the senior managers who constituted the oligarchy and who kept all the information to themselves. As I guessed last time I wrote, decisions like this don’t get taken at board level. They are taken out of the line of sight of the board.

Governance

So here we have a known risk. A threat that would likely not be detected in the usual run of line management. And it was of such a magnitude as would inflict hideous ruin on Volkswagen’s value, accrued over decades of hard built customer reputation. Volkswagen, an eminent manufacturer with huge resources, material, human and intellectual. What was the governance function to do?

Borrowing strength again

It would have been simple, actually simple, to secret shop the occasional vehicle and run it through an on-road emissions test. Any surprising discrepancy between the results and the regulatory tests would then have been a signal that the company was at risk and triggered further investigation. An important check on any data integrity is to compare it with cognate data collected by an independent route, data that shares borrowing strength.

Volkswagen’s governance function simply didn’t do the simple thing. Never have so many ISO 31000 manuals been printed in vain. Theirs were the pot odds of a jaywalker.

Knowledge

In the English breach of trust case of Baden, Delvaux and Lecuit v Société Générale [1983] BCLC 325, Mr Justice Peter Gibson identified five levels of knowledge that might implicate somebody in wrongdoing.

  • Actual knowledge.
  • Wilfully shutting one’s eyes to the obvious (Nelsonian knowledge).
  • Wilfully and recklessly failing to make such enquiries as an honest and reasonable man would make.
  • Knowledge of circumstances that would indicate the facts to an honest and reasonable man.
  • Knowledge of circumstances that would put an honest and reasonable man on enquiry.

I wonder where VW would place themselves in that.

How do you sound when you feel sorry?

… is the somewhat barbed rejoinder to an ungracious apology. Let me explain how to be sorry. There are three “R”s.

  • Remorse: Different from the “regret” that you got caught. A genuine internal emotional reaction. The public are good at spotting when emotions are genuine but it is best evidenced by the following two “R”s.
  • Reparation: Trying to undo the damage. VW will not have much choice about this as far as the motorists are concerned but the shareholders may be a different matter. I don’t think Horn’s director’s insurance will go very far.
  • Reform: This is the barycentre of repentance. Can VW now change the way it operates to adopt genuine governance and systematic risk management?

Mr Horn tells us that he has little control over what happens in his company. That is probably true. I trust that he will remember that at his next remuneration review. If there is one.

When they said, “Repent!”, I wonder what they meant.

Leonard Cohen
The Future

First thoughts on VW’s emmissions debacle

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It is far too soon to tell exactly what went on at VW, in the wider motor industry, within the respective regulators and within governments. However, the way that the news has come out, and the financial and operational impact that it is likely to have, are enough to encourage all enterprises to revisit their risk management, governance and customer reputation management policies. Corporate scandals are not a new phenomenon, from the collapse of the Medici Bank in 1494, Warren Hastings’ alleged despotism in the British East India Company, down to the FIFA corruption allegations that broke earlier this year. Organisational scandals are as old as organisations. The bigger the organisations get, the bigger the scandals are going to be.

Normal Scandals

In 1984, Scott Perrow published his pessimistic analysis of what he saw as the inevitability of Normal Accidents in complex technologies. I am sure that there is a market for a book entitled Normal Scandals: Living with High-Risk Organisational Structures. But I don’t share Perrow’s pessimism. Life is getting safer. Let’s adopt the spirit of continual improvement to make investment safer too. That’s investment for those of us trying to accumulate a modest portfolio for retirement. Those who aspire to join the super rich will still have to take their chances.

I fully understand that organisations sometimes have to take existential risks to stay in business. The development of Rolls-Royce’s RB211 aero-engine well illustrates what happens when a manufacturer finds itself with proven technologies that are inadequately aligned with the Voice of the Customer. The market will not wait while the business catches up. There is time to develop a response but only if that solution works first time. In the case of Rolls-Royce it didn’t and insolvency followed. However, there was no alternative but to try.

What happened at VW? I just wonder whether the Iron Law of Oligarchy was at work. To imagine that a supervisory board sits around discussing the details of engine management software is naïve. In fact it was the RB211 crisis that condemned such signal failures of management to delegate. Do VW’s woes flow from a decision taken by a middle manager, or a blind eye turned, that escaped an inadequate system of governance? Perhaps a short term patch in anticipation of an ultimate solution?

Cardinal Newman’s contribution to governance theory

John Henry Newman learned about risk management the hard way. Newman was an English Anglican divine who converted to the Catholic Church in 1845. In 1850 Newman became involved in the controversy surrounding Giacinto Achilli, a priest expelled from the Catholic Church for rape and sexual assault but who was making a name from himself in England as a champion of the protestant evangelical cause. Conflict between Catholic and protestant was a significant feature of the nineteenth century English political landscape. Newman was minded to ensure that Achilli’s background was widely known. He took legal advice from counsel James Hope-Scott about the risks of a libel action from Achilli. Hope-Scott was reassuring and Newman published. The publication resulted in Newman’s prosecution and conviction for criminal libel.

Speculation about what legal advice VW have received as to their emissions strategy would be inappropriate. However, I trust that, if they imagined they were externalising any risk thereby, they checked the value of their legal advisors’ professional indemnity insurance.

Newman certainly seems to have learned his lesson and subsequently had much to teach the modern world about risk management and governance. After the Achilli trial Newman started work on his philosophical apologia, The Grammar of Assent. One argument in that book has had such an impact on modern thinking about evidence and probability that it was quoted in full by Bruno de Finetti in Volume 1 of his 1974 Theory of Probability.

Supposes a thesis (e.g. the guilt of an accused man) is supported by a great deal of circumstantial evidence of different forms, but in agreement with each other; then even if each piece of evidence is in itself insufficient to produce any strong belief, the thesis is decisively strengthened by their joint effect.

De Finetti set out the detailed mathematics and called this the Cardinal Newman principle. It is fundamental to the modern concept of borrowing strength.

The standard means of defeating governance are all well known to oligarchs, regulator capture, “stake-driving” – taking actions outside the oversight of governance that will not be undone without engaging the regulator in controversy, “whipsawing” – promising A that approval will be forthcoming from B while telling B that A has relied upon her anticipated, and surely “uncontroversial”, approval. There are plenty of others. Robert Caro’s biography The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York sets out the locus classicus.

Governance functions need to exploit the borrowing strength of diverse data sources to identify misreporting and misconduct. And continually improve how they do that. The answer is trenchant and candid criticism of historical data. That’s the only data you have. A rigorous system of goal deployment and mature use of process behaviour charts delivers a potent stimulus to reluctant data sharers.

Things and actions are what they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

Bishop Joseph Butler

 

Amazon II: The sales story

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Jeff Bezos' iconic laugh.jpgI recently commented on an item in the New York Times about Amazon’s pursuit of “rigorous data driven management”. Dina Vaccari, one of the employees cited in the original New York Times article, has taken the opportunity to tell her own story in this piece. I found it enlightening as to what goes on at Amazon. Of course, it is only another anecdote from a former employee, a data source of notoriously limited quality. However, as Arthur Koestler once observed:

Without the hard little bits of marble which are called ‘facts’ or ‘data’ one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.

Vaccari’s role was to sell Amazon gift cards. The measure of her success was how many she sold. Vaccari had read Timothy Ferriss’ transgressive little book The 4-Hour Workweek. She decided to employ a subcontractor from Chennai, India to generate for her 100 leads daily for $10. The idea worked out well. Another illustration of the law of comparative advantage.

Vaccari them emailed the leads, not with the standard email that she had been instructed to use by Amazon, but with a formula of her own. Vacarri claims a 10 to 50% response rate. She then followed up using her traditional sales skills, exceeding her sales target and besting the rest of the sales team.

That drew attention from her supervisor. Not unnaturally he wanted to capture good practice. When he saw Vaccari’s non-standard email he was critical. We now know that process discipline is important at Amazon. Nothing wrong with that though if you really want to exercise your mind on the topic you would do well to watch the Hollywood movie Crimson Tide.

What is more interesting is that, when Vaccari answered the criticism by pointing to her response and sales figures, the supervisor retorted that this was “just luck”.

So there we have it. Somebody made a change and the organisation couldn’t agree whether or not it was an improvement. Vaccari said she saw a signal. Her supervisor said that it was just noise.

The supervisor’s response was particularly odd as he was shadowing Vacarri because of his favourable perception of her performance. It is as though his assessment as to whether Vacarri’s results were signal or noise depended on his approval or disapproval of how she had achieved them. It certainly seems that this is not normative behaviour at Amazon. Vaccari criticises her supervisor for failing to display Amazon Leadership Principles. The exchange illustrates what happens if an organisation generates data but is then unable to turn it into a reliable basis for action because there is no systematic and transparent method for creating a consensus around what is signal and what, noise. Vicarri’s exchange with her supervisor is reassuring in that both recognised that there is an important distinction. Vacarri knew that a signal should be a tocsin for action, in this case to embed a successful innovation through company wide standardisation. Her supervisor knew that to mistake noise for a signal would lead to a degraded process performance. Or at least he hid behind that to project his disapproval. Vacarri’s recall of the incident makes her “cringe”. Numbers aren’t just about numbers.

Trenchant data criticism, motivated by the rigorous segregation of signal and noise, is the catalyst of continual improvement in sales, product quality, economic efficiency and market agility.

The goal is not to be driven by data but to be led by the insights it yields.

Data science sold down the Amazon? Jeff Bezos and the culture of rigour

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This blog appeared on the Royal Statistical Society website Statslife on 25 August 2015

Jeff Bezos' iconic laugh.jpgThis recent item in the New York Times has catalysed discussion among managers. The article tells of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and his pursuit of rigorous data driven management. It also tells employees’ own negative stories of how that felt emotionally.

The New York Times says that Amazon is pervaded with abundant data streams that are used to judge individual human performance and which drive reward and advancement. They inform termination decisions too.

The recollections of former employees are not the best source of evidence about how a company conducts its business. Amazon’s share of the retail market is impressive and they must be doing something right. What everybody else wants to know is, what is it? Amazon are very coy about how they operate and there is a danger that the business world at large takes the wrong messages.

Targets

Targets are essential to business. The marketing director predicts that his new advertising campaign will create demand for 12,000 units next year. The operations director looks at her historical production data. She concludes that the process lacks the capability reliably to produce those volumes. She estimates the budget required to upgrade the process and to achieve 12,000 units annually. The executive board considers the business case and signs off the investment. Both marketing and operations directors now have a target.

Targets communicate improvement priorities. They build confidence between interfacing processes. They provide constraints and parameters that prevent the system causing harm. Harm to others or harm to itself. They allow the pace and substance of multiple business processes, and diverse entities, to be matched and aligned.

But everyone who has worked in business sees it as less simple than that. The marketing and operations directors are people.

Signal and noise

Drawing conclusions from data might be an uncontroversial matter were it not for the most common feature of data, fluctuation. Call it variation if you prefer. Business measures do not stand still. Every month, week, day and hour is different. All data features noise. Sometimes is goes up, sometimes down. A whole ecology of occult causes, weakly characterised, unknown and as yet unsuspected, interact to cause irregular variation. They are what cause a coin variously to fall “heads” or “tails”. That variation may often be stable enough, or if you like “exchangeable“, so as to allow statistical predictions to be made, as in the case of the coin toss.

If all data features noise then some data features signals. A signal is a sign, an indicator that some palpable cause has made the data stand out from the background noise. It is that assignable cause which enables inferences to be drawn about what interventions in the business process have had a tangible effect and what future innovations might cement any gains or lead to bigger prospective wins. Signal and noise lead to wholly different business strategies.

The relevance for business is that people, where not exposed to rigorous decision support, are really bad at telling the difference between signal and noise. Nobel laureate economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has amassed a lifetime of experimental and anecdotal data capturing noise misinterpreted as signal and judgments in the face of compelling data, distorted by emotional and contextual distractions.

Signal and accountability

It is a familiar trope of business, and government, that extravagant promises are made, impressive business cases set out and targets signed off. Yet the ultimate scrutiny as to whether that envisaged performance was realised often lacks rigour. Noise, with its irregular ups and downs, allows those seeking solace from failure to pick out select data points and cast self-serving narratives on the evidence.

Our hypothetical marketing director may fail to achieve his target but recount how there were two individual months where sales exceeded 1,000, construct elaborate rationales as to why only they are representative of his efforts and point to purported external factors that frustrated the remaining ten reports. Pairs of individual data points can always be selected to support any story, Don Wheeler’s classic executive time series.

This is where the ability to distinguish signal and noise is critical. To establish whether targets have been achieved requires crisp definition of business measures, not only outcomes but also the leading indicators that provide context and advise judgment as to prediction reliability. Distinguishing signal and noise requires transparent reporting that allows diverse streams of data criticism. It requires a rigorous approach to characterising noise and a systematic approach not only to identifying signals but to reacting to them in an agile and sustainable manner.

Data is essential to celebrating a target successfully achieved and to responding constructively to a failure. But where noise is gifted the status of signal to confirm a fanciful business case, or to protect a heavily invested reputation, then the business is misled, costs increased, profits foregone and investors cheated.

Where employees believe that success and reward is being fudged, whether because of wishful thinking or lack of data skills, or mistakenly through lack of transparency, then cynicism and demotivation will breed virulently. Employees watch the behaviours of their seniors carefully as models of what will lead to their own advancement. Where it is deceit or innumeracy that succeed, that is what will thrive.

Noise and blame

Here is some data of the number of defects caused by production workers last month.

Worker Defects
Al 10
Simone 6
Jose 10
Gabriela 16
Stan 10

What is to be done about Gabriela? Move to an easier job? Perhaps retraining? Or should she be let go? And Simone? Promote to supervisor?

Well, the numbers were just random numbers that I generated. I didn’t add anything in to make Gabriela’s score higher and there was nothing in the way that I generated the data to suggest who would come top or bottom. The data are simply noise. They are the sort of thing that you might observe in a manufacturing plant that presented a “stable system of trouble”. Nothing in the data signals any behaviour, attitude, skill or diligence that Gabriela lacked or wrongly exercised. The next month’s data would likely show a different candidate for dismissal.

Mistaking signal for noise is, like mistaking noise for signal, the path to business under performance and employee disillusionment. It has a particularly corrosive effect where used, as it might be in Gabriela’s case, to justify termination. The remaining staff will be bemused as to what Gabriela was actually doing wrong and start to attach myriad and irrational doubts to all sorts of things in the business. There may be a resort to magical thinking. The survivors will be less open and less willing to share problems with their supervisors. The business itself has the costs of recruitment to replace Gabriela. The saddest aspect of the whole business is the likelihood that Gabriela’s replacement will perform better than did Gabriela, vindicating the dismissal in the mind of her supervisor. This is the familiar statistical artefact of regression to the mean. An extreme event is likely to be followed by one less extreme. Again, Kahneman has collected sundry examples of managers so deceived by singular human performance and disappointed by its modest follow-up.

It was W Edwards Deming who observed that every time you recruit a new employee you take a random sample from the pool of job seekers. That’s why you get the regression to the mean. It must be true at Amazon too as their human resources executive Mr Tony Galbato explains their termination statistics by admitting that “We don’t always get it right.” Of course, everybody thinks that their recruitment procedures are better than average. That’s a management claim that could well do with rigorous testing by data.

Further, mistaking noise for signal brings the additional business expense of over adjustment, spending money to add costly variation while degrading customer satisfaction. Nobody in the business feels good about that.

Target quality, data quality

I admitted above that the evidence we have about Amazon’s operations is not of the highest quality. I’m not in a position to judge what goes on at Amazon. But all should fix in their minds that setting targets demands rigorous risk assessment, analysis of perverse incentives and intense customer focus.

It is a sad reality that, if you set incentives perversely enough,some individuals will find ways of misreporting data. BNFL’s embarrassment with Kansai Electric and Steven Eaton’s criminal conviction were not isolated incidents.

One thing that especially bothered me about the Amazon report was the soi-disant Anytime Feedback Tool that allowed unsolicited anonymous peer appraisal. Apparently, this formed part of the “data” that determined individual advancement or termination. The description was unchallenged by Amazon’s spokesman (sic) Mr Craig Berman. I’m afraid, and I say this as a practising lawyer, unsourced and unchallenged “evidence” carries the spoor of the Star Chamber and the party purge. I would have thought that a pretty reliable method for generating unreliable data would be to maximise the personal incentives for distortion while protecting it from scrutiny or governance.

Kahneman observed that:

… we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify.

It is the perverse confluence of fluctuations and individual psychology that makes statistical science essential, data analytics interesting and business, law and government difficult.