The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

Unfortunately the science of behavior is not yet as successful in controlling emotion as it is in shaping behavior.”

Amos was fond of saying that interesting things happened to people who could weave them into interesting stories.

Amos liked to say that stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.

“Belief in the Law of Small Numbers” teased out the implications of a single mental error that people commonly made—even when those people were trained statisticians. People mistook even a very small part of a thing for the whole. Even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence. They did this, Amos and Danny argued, because they believed—even if they did not acknowledge the belief—that any given sample of a large population was more representative of that population than it actually was.

Even people trained in statistics and probability theory failed to intuit how much more variable a small sample could be than the general population—and that the smaller the sample, the lower the likelihood that it would mirror the broader population.

The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgments. “The production of a compelling scenario is likely to constrain future thinking,” wrote Danny and Amos. “There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.”

“We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”¶

Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away,

People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe In this match, surprises are expected Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable

“He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

“Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.