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.

The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see.

“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.

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.

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

A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.

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

For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.”

People did not choose between things. They chose between descriptions of things.

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