The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

writing laws to make it more difficult for African Americans to vote, the comedian John Oliver congratulated the legislators for having “Money-balled racism.”

Moneyball for racism

What were people’s minds doing—even the minds of supposed experts—that led them to the misjudgments that could be exploited for profit by others, who ignored the experts and relied on data?

everything we looked at was nonpredictive,” says Morey. But not everything. Rebounds per minute were useful in predicting the future success of big guys. Steals per minute told you something about the small ones. It didn’t matter so much how tall a player was as how high he could reach with his hands—his length rather than his height.

Predictive personal bhvr

greater weight to games played against strong opponents

Opponent strength

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because

Con bias

Morey enrolled in an executive education course at Harvard Business School and took a class in behavioral economics.

Morey Harvard

The mere fact that they owned Kyle Lowry appeared to have distorted their judgment about him.**

Sunken costs

“hindsight bias”—which

Hindsight bias

“The owners often made their money from disrupting fields where most of the conventional wisdom is bullshit,”

trench warfare at Verdun,

Yeshayahu Leibowitz—whom

behaviorism.

Bhvrsm

Gestalt† psychology. Led by German Jews—its origins were in early twentieth-century Berlin—it sought to explore, scientifically, the mysteries of the human mind.

Over the next five years, the state accepted more than 730,000 immigrants from different

Mothers stumbled unexpectedly upon their own children, who they thought had been murdered by the Germans, on the streets of Israeli cities.

Amos Tversky

“Comparison of alternatives in which one is superior to the other in every respect makes for a simple but rather trivial theory.”

Foundations of Measurement—more

Conservative Bayesians.

Why conservatism is wrong

Theories for Amos were like mental pockets or briefcases, places to put the ideas you wanted to keep. Until you could replace a theory with a better

With Amos you always just picked up where you left off, no matter how long it had been since you last saw him. With Danny there was always a sense you were starting over, even if you had been with him just yesterday.

Amos was the most terrifying mind most people had ever encountered.

Both were grandsons of Eastern European rabbis, for a start. Both were explicitly interested in how people functioned when they were in a “normal” unemotional state. Both wanted to do science. Both wanted to search for simple, powerful truths.

In commoN

Whatever human beings did when presented with a problem that had a statistically correct answer, it wasn’t statistics. But how did you sell that to an

“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” teased out the implications of a single mental error that people

First article

“the gambler’s fallacy.”

as if the coin itself could even things out.

the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population. They assumed that the sample would

assumed that whatever had been learned from either group must be generally true, even if one lesson seemed to contradict the other.

His belief in the law of small numbers, therefore, will forever remain intact.”

Statistics was the way you should think about probabilistic situations, but statistics was not the way people did it. Their subjects were

If the mind, when it was making probabilistic judgments about an uncertain world, was not an intuitive statistician, what was it? If it wasn’t doing what the leading social scientists thought it did, and economic theory assumed that it did, what, exactly, was it doing?

Key question on the mind

He began by pointing out the small mountain of research that suggested that expert judgment was less reliable than algorithms.

when presented with duplicates of the same ulcer, every doctor had contradicted himself and rendered more than one diagnosis:

They were trying to determine how people judged—or, rather, misjudged—the odds of any situation when the odds were hard, or impossible, to know. All the questions had right answers and wrong answers.

“We thought that errors we did not make ourselves were not interesting.”

“Amos almost suspended disbelief when we were working together,” said Danny. “He didn’t do that much for other people. And that was the engine of the collaboration.”

These rules of thumb Danny and Amos called “heuristics.” And the first heuristic they wanted to explore they called “representativeness.”

“People can be taught the correct rule, perhaps even with little difficulty. The point remains that people do not follow the correct rule, when left to their own devices.”

Human judgment was distorted by . . . the memorable.

not just that people don’t know what they don’t know, but that they don’t bother to factor their ignorance into their judgments.

Dkdk

We are exposed to a lifetime schedule in which we are most often rewarded for punishing others, and punished for rewarding.

“Creeping determinism,”

Creeping determinism

compelling is that the mistakes were predictable and systematic.

To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The

“peak-end rule.” It

Peak end rule

fighting in 1973: You ran toward the war.

Psychologists in the Israeli army were, in short, off the leash.

“the understanding of numbers is so weak that they don’t communicate anything. Everyone feels that those probabilities are not real—that they are just something on somebody’s mind.”

attempted to teach people to be aware of the pitfalls and fallacies of their own reasoning,”

Quote: education