The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

In his own job interview, Morey was reassured by Alexander’s social fearlessness, and the spirit in which he operated. “He asked me, ‘What religion are you?’ I remember thinking, I don’t think you’re supposed to ask me that. I answered it vaguely, and I think I was saying my family were Episcopalians and Lutherans when he stops me and says, ‘Just tell me you don’t believe any of that shit.’”

He had a diffidence about him—an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making decisions. He never simply went with his first thought. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

at the age of thirteen, Danny made his final decision about God. “I still remember where I was—the street in Jerusalem. I remember thinking that I could imagine there was a God, but not one who cared whether or not I masturbate. I reached the conclusion that there was no God. That was the end of my religious life.”

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.

Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.

At a very young age, Amos had recognized a distinction within the class of people who insisted on making their lives complicated. Amos had a gift for avoiding what he called “overcomplicated” people. But every now and then he ran into a person, usually a woman, whose complications genuinely interested him.

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.”

Later Redelmeier said as much to one of his fellow students, an American. What is it with you freedom-loving Americans? he asked. Live free or die. I don’t get it. I say, “Regulate me gently. I’d rather live.”

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

“The pain that is experienced when the loss is caused by an act that modified the status quo is significantly greater than the pain that is experienced when the decision led to the retention of the status quo,”

“the objections you raised against our experimental method are simply unsupported. In essence, you engage in the practice of criticizing a procedural departure without showing how the departure might account for the results obtained. You do not present either contradictory data or a plausible alternative interpretation of our findings. Instead, you express a strong bias against our method of data collection and in favor of yours. This position is certainly understandable, yet it is hardly convincing.”

In their final conversation, Danny told Amos that he dreaded the thought of writing something under Amos’s name of which Amos might disapprove. “I said, ‘I don’t trust what I’m going to do,’” Danny said. “And he said, ‘You will just have to trust in the model of me that is in your mind.’”