The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

“Your mind needs to be in a constant state of defense against all this crap that is trying to mislead you,”

The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.

a big part of a consultant’s job was to feign total certainty about uncertain things.

There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, “It’s impossible to know for sure.”

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

Instead of knowing the number of rebounds a player had, for instance, they began to count the number of genuine opportunities for rebounds he’d had and, of those, how many he had snagged.

“What I missed were the limitations of the model.”

“Confirmation bias,”

Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.

“the endowment effect.”

“present bias”—the

“hindsight bias”—which