After two and a half months, I finally finished reading this book "Noise: The Flaws In Human Judgement". It took me so long, partly because it was so academic.
It talks about how we overconfident in our estimates and judgements. We always pride ourselves as sentient beings that robots cannot come close in terms of emotion and judgement. But this can be our weakness as well. We always tell ourselves to trust our gut feelings, but there are times these produce a lot of errors.
Overall, there are a lot of insights to glean from. I had the chance to share the book with two of my psychiatrist, since it is mentioned in the book psychiatry is the most "noisy" specialty in medicine.
Personally, I do agree with this statement. There are many times I feel frustrated because I find uncertainties in terms of diagnosis. Unfortunately, there is no blood test or imaging to diagnose a mental health condition. We depend on symptoms. Even though the DSM is there to help us to stratify the diagnosis, but it is still not perfect.
Another big challenge in this field is about risk assessment. I admit I am really bad at this. We always want to estimate how high is the risk of a person to commit suicide. But research shows that this is the most difficult thing to ascertain as suicide is very unpredictable.
The book also talks about ways to reduce those noise. For medical field, clinical practice guidelines are a way to ensure uniformity across the diagnosis. Even so, patients' presentations are variable. One thing mentioned is about decision making hygiene. After finishing the book, I still need some time to digest the content, and hopefully able to improve my clinical judgement in my practice.
