I spoke with Andrea today, who was the copy editor for my book. Andrea is a very bright professional who takes tremedous pride in her craft. She has almost superhuman ability to pay attention to detail and I consider myself very blessed to have had the opportunity to work with her on my book. Andrea is also inconsistent in the application of her expertise.

She edited my book twice, both before it was typeset and approximately a month later after the type setting process was complete. While typically after a book is typeset, the copy editor gives the book a perfunctory look through, I asked Andrea to go through my book in detail after it was typeset for a second time. Guess what? She found several things on the second look through that she did not change on her first look. Andrea, like experts in ever field of human endeavor, is inconsistent in the application of her judgment. She simply does not make the exact same decision each time for the exact same fact set

Several years ago researchers gave a group of pathologists fact sets for 192 patients and asked them to determine if the patient's tumors were malignant. However, unkown to the patholgists, the fact set contained the data for only 96 patients. Each patient's data was duplicated. If the pathologists were consistent, they should have made the exact same decisions each time. But for a number of patients, the patholgists came to opposite conclusions for the exact same data. The first time they said the tumor was malignant and the second time they said it was not.

We need to understand that even people in the top of their field (such as Andrea) when applying their judgment to a fact set will be inconsistent in their decisions. This is why naked decision making strategies are so useful. When decisions are made by a predetermined rules, the exact same decision is made for the same fact set each time. Naked strategies provide consistency that human judgement can not duplicate.