How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 12 The Ultimate Measurement Instrument: Human Judges

The human mind does have some remarkable advantages over the typical mechanical measurement instrument. It has a unique ability to assess complex and ambiguous situations where other measurement instruments would be useless. Tasks such as recognizing one face or voice in a crowd pose great challenges for software developers (although progress has been made) but are trivial for a five-year-old. And we are a very long way from developing an artificial intelligence that can write a critical review of a movie or business plan. In fact, the human mind is a great tool for genuinely objective measurement. Or, rather, it would be if it wasn’t for a daunting list of common human biases and fallacies.

It’s no revelation that the human mind is not a purely rational calculating machine. It is a complex system that seems to comprehend and adapt to its environment with an array of simplifying rules. Nearly all of these rules prefer simplicity over rationality, and many even contradict each other. Those that are not quite rational but perhaps not a bad rule of thumb are called “heuristics.” Those that utterly fly in the face of reason are called “fallacies.”

If we have any hope of using the human mind as a measurement instrument, we need to find a way to exploit its strengths while adjusting for its errors. In the same way that calibration of probabilities can offset the human tendency for overconfidence, there are methods that can ...