The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

“I do remember that my mother saw the horrors coming long before he did—she was the pessimist and the worrier, he was sunny and optimistic.”

I get differences . but what about consuming information to update your assessment ? one challenge is commitment to consistency Tagore: "truth comes as a conqueror only to those who have lost the art of welcoming her as a friend"

“I was really angry about him dying,” said Danny. “He had been good. But he had not been strong.”

Good but not strong

Faith is God made sensible to the heart,

Interesting

How, for instance, the French army’s memory of Germany’s military strategy in the last war might lead them to misjudge that strategy in a new war.

The last war

How do we prevent the intuition of interviewers from screwing up their assessment of army recruits?

Good question

exercise was meant to illustrate the powerful instinct people have for finding causes for any effect, and also for creating narratives.

Cause seeking

“at how easy it is to shift from an efficient killing machine to compassionate human being, and how quick the switch may be.” How did that happen?

Context ? vasanas?

then had her career derailed by children.

Derailed

“You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.”

That’s an AWESOME put down

“No matter what the topic was, the first thing Amos thought was in the top 10 percent. This

Sheesh

Jews were petty merchants. They had to assess others, all the time. Who is dangerous? Who is not dangerous? Who will repay the debt, who won’t repay the debt? People were basically dependent on their psychological judgment.”

Merchants know psychology out of necessity .there are rewards. so reinforced too

“The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

Interesting perspective maybe not always true tho. Mozart

If you went to a doctor in the seventeenth century, you were worse off for having gone. By the end of the nineteenth century, going to the doctor was a break-even proposition: You were as likely to come away from the visit better off as you were to be worse off. Amos argued that clinical psychology was like medicine in the seventeenth century, and he had lots of evidence to support his case. One

Evolution within the field some fields get better. Some never (astrology ?) why? Intrinsic Truth? application of scientific principles?

some of our biological systems we are equipped to detect big differences; in others, small ones—say, a tickle versus a poke. If people can’t detect small differences, Amos figured, they might violate transitivity.”

Small differences

Not all objects have the same number of noticeable features: New York City had more of them than Tel Aviv, for instance.

Not the same number of noticeable features

When people make decisions, they are also making judgments about similarity, between some object in the real world and what they ideally want. They make these judgments by, in effect, counting up the features they notice. And as the noticeability of features can be manipulated by the way they are highlighted, the sense of how similar two things are might also be manipulated. For instance, if you wanted two people to think of themselves as more similar to each other than they otherwise might, you might put them in a context that stressed the features they shared. Two American college students in the United States might look at each other and see a total stranger; the same two college students on their junior year abroad in Togo might find that they are surprisingly similar: They’re both Americans! By

We can manipulate the sense of proximity

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.

If you want to stop racism, stop measuring race?

And you destroy it. He saw himself doing a negative style of science. He used the word a lot: negative. This turns out to be a very powerful way of doing social science.”

Work backwards

And of course everyone was in the army, even the professors, and so it was impossible even for the most rarefied intellectual to insulate himself from the risks facing the entire society.

Good i think

President Nasser had spoken with Ahmad Shukairy, the founder of the recently formed Palestine Liberation Organization. Nasser had proposed that Jews who survived the war be returned to their home countries; Shukairy had replied that there was no need to worry about it, as there wouldn’t be any Jewish survivors.

Fight to death

Starving for admiration and affection. Very edgy. Very impressionable. But could get easily insulted.”

Even the greats

There was, quite possibly, as they put it, “an antagonism between thinking and perceiving.”

Antagonism between perceiving and thinking

but a more subtle mechanism that selectively weakened, rather than entirely blocked, background noise. That background noise might get through was, of course, not the happiest news for passengers in airplanes circling the control tower. But it was interesting.

Not on off but weaken/ strengthen

the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.”

Reduce force that impedes your goals

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.

I am guilty of this

We have a kind of stereotype of “randomness” that differs from true randomness. Our stereotype of randomness lacks the clusters and patterns that occur in true random sequences. If you pass out twenty marbles randomly to five boys, they are actually more likely to each receive four marbles (column II), than they are to receive the combination in column I, and yet American college students insisted that the unequal distribution in column I was more likely than the equal one in column II.

We don’t know what random looks like

Their memories of the odds they had assigned to various outcomes were badly distorted. They all believed that they had assigned higher probabilities to what happened than they actually had. They greatly overestimated the odds that they had assigned to what had actually happened. That is, once they knew the outcome, they thought it had been far more predictable than they had found it to be before, when they had tried to predict it.

Yikes

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

Great quote

Redelmeier loses track of time when he is having fun,” said Redelmeier.

Great comment

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

Story, not number

Danny thought that people anticipated regret, and adjusted for it, in a way they did not anticipate or adjust for other emotions.

Great point

was as if Danny thought that by anticipating his feelings he might dull the pain they would inevitably bring.

I feel ya!

People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn’t done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have. “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,”

Regret things you did or things they wish they hadn't done did i alter status quo

“When one fails to take action that could have avoided a disaster, one does not accept responsibility for the occurrence of the disaster.”

I regret changing status quo and bad happens

The notion that people making risky decisions were especially sensitive to change pretty clearly had at least started with Danny. But

People taking risks are sensitized

It wasn’t hard to imagine why this might be—a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival.

Sensitivity to pain helps survival

Amos liked to call good ideas “raisins.” There were three raisins in the new theory. The first was the realization that people responded to changes rather than absolute levels. The second was the discovery that people approached risk very differently when it involved losses than when it involved gains. Exploring people’s responses to specific gambles, they found a third raisin: People did not respond to probability in a straightforward manner.

Good summary

People’s emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss.

Remote odds trigger emotion

the theorists had spent less time with money and more time with politics and war, or even marriage, they might have come to different conclusions about human nature. In politics and war, as in fraught human relationships, the choice faced by the decision maker was often between two unpleasant options. “A very different view of man as a decision maker might well have emerged if the outcomes of decisions in the private-personal, political or strategic domains had been as easily measurable as monetary gains and losses,”

Availability bias

“If you tell an academic to his face, ‘You’ve just said something really stupid’—okay, the big ones might say, ‘How is it stupid?,’ but the little ones just store it.”

Intellectual Pride

“The way it feels to me,” he said, “is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think. And now I can think them.” He would begin, he decided, by

Hoorah soldier

“A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts ‘irrational behavior’ if the behavior in question is, in fact, observed.”

Reality trumps all

It was a worldview that took it as given that the only way to change people’s behavior was to change their financial incentives.

False

He and Amos wanted to avoid getting into an argument about the rationality of man. That argument would only distract people from the phenomenon they were uncovering.

Reality. dont argue, share facts

“What made the theory important and what made it viable were completely different,” said Danny, years later.

Important vs viable

There is envy!

So true

listened to it,” Danny said, “and it is absolutely clear from it that we are finished.”

What people hear

have a feeling that I initiate a lot, but the product is always out of my reach,” Danny would one day tell Miles Shore.

Wonderful description

“He changed the way we trained pilots,” said Maher. “We changed the culture in the cockpit and the autocratic jerk became no longer acceptable. Those mistakes haven’t happened since.”

Aha!!!

that psychologists think economists are immoral and economists think psychologists are stupid.”

Stereotypes