Noise: decision hygiene, not debiasing, fits a collective whose errors have no known direction.

The claim

Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein distinguish debiasing, which needs to know which bias it fights and in which direction, from decision hygiene, which prevents errors it cannot name: "following the principles of decision hygiene means that you adopt techniques that reduce noise without ever knowing which underlying errors you are helping to avoid." Noise is "unpredictable error that we cannot easily see or explain." The errors of a mixed collective of agents and people have no single known direction, so the collective's first investment should be process (independence, sequencing, structure, aggregation) rather than a growing list of per-bias corrections. Inference beyond the quotes is Leo's.