Is Audiobook Casting Noisy 1? How to Delay Intuition and Find the Right Narrator
How to Delay Intuition and Hire a Narrator by Eljinproductions.com
So, I’m thinking about casting and talent marketplace apps. Then I start listening to Daniel Kahneman’s Noise, read by Jonathan Todd Ross. (Nice job, Jonathan!) DK is a behavioral psychologist, economist, and Nobel Prize winner. You probably know his approach through something like Freakonomics—pure School of Kahneman.
For decades, DK and his colleague, Amos Tversky, studied “cognitive bias” as a source of error in decision-making. Think of bias this way:
Someone intuitively believes X to be true or reflexively likes/dislikes Y.
Therefore that person makes decision Z without questioning the validity of X or the tenability of Y.
Bias operates through individual decisions. Unchecked, it can lead to error, injustice, and organizational dysfunction. (Just read the news!)
Noise is a related concept, but it’s only apparent in groups of decisions. It’s a statistical phenomenon. Examples:
Fifty doctors examine patient A’s symptoms and offer diagnoses that differ in small and big ways.
Fifty judges review defendant P’s conviction on Q charges and recommend sentences that vary from relatively lenient to quite harsh.
Same medical histories. Same legal proceedings. But the outcomes vary unpredictably, even reflect sloppy reasoning and downright error. And all that variability, unpredictability, and error is noise. The goal for Kahneman isn’t to eliminate noise but to reduce it. What might work?
Reducing the Noise in Audiobook Casting: Where to Begin
Before engaging a narrator, it’s important to do one of two things:
Establish a set of rules. Example: to identify the best narrator for a project, list the qualities you desire most, then rank each candidate accordingly.
Or…
Create a simple algorithm that imitates how pros aggregate information to make casting decisions.
Doing either helps to delay intuition—for DK, the key to good decision-making. No one can eradicate subjectivity from human judgment, even from expert judgment. But a disciplined process allows us to wait out impulses, to deliberate, then to act effectively.
Delaying intuition got me thinking—about noise, audiobook casting, and talent marketplaces. Conceded: Casting is less consequential than medicine (life/death) and criminal justice (freedom/incarceration). Still, when you’re deciding who works and who doesn’t, that’s heavy.
So in the next three posts, I want to look at casting audiobooks: how it differs from simple choice and preference, how casting decisions are really made and under what circumstances, how talent marketplaces can shape casting. I’ll give it some thought.
