The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

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.

What drove others crazy might have helped to keep Danny sane. His moods were grease for his idea factory.

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

“intuitive expectations are governed by a consistent misperception of the world,”

heuristic

germane

“Last impressions can be lasting impressions.”

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people’s desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.

“Something happens when you are with a woman you love,” said Danny. “You know something happened. You know it’s not good. But you go on.” You are in love, and yet you sense a new force pulling you out of it. Your mind has lit upon the possibility of another narrative.

“The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can,” he once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. “It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation.” The mind, when it dealt with uncertain situations, was like a Swiss Army knife. It was a good enough tool for most jobs required of it, but not exactly suited to anything—and

“Psychologists as a rule will only interrupt a presentation for clarification,” says psychologist Dan Gilbert. “Economists will interrupt to show how smart they are.” “In economics it is completely normal to be rude,”

‘Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.’” Amos seemed to understand that an early death was the price of being a Spartan.

He’d always been good at preparing himself for not getting what he wanted, and in the grand scheme of things this was not a hard blow. He was fine with who he was and what he had done. He could now safely imagine what he would have done had he won the Nobel Prize. He would have brought Amos’s wife and children with him. He would have appended to his Nobel lecture his eulogy of Amos. He would have carried Amos to Stockholm with him. He would have done for Amos what Amos could never do for him.

The problem is not a deficit of gratitude but a surplus of debt. I