The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

It was counter to all the work that was being done—which was governed by the idea that you were going to explain human judgment by correcting for some more or less minor error to the Bayesian model. It was exactly contrary to the ideas that I had. Statistics was the way you should think about probabilistic situations, but statistics was not the way people did it. Their subjects were all sophisticated in statistics—and even they got it wrong! Every question in the paper that the audience got wrong I felt the temptation to get wrong.” That verdict—that Danny and Amos’s paper wasn’t just fun but important—would eventually be echoed outside of psychology. “Over and over again economists say, ‘If the evidence of the world tells you it is true, then people figure out what’s true,’” says Matthew Rabin, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “That people are, in effect, very good statisticians. And if they aren’t—well, they don’t survive. And so if you are going down the list of things that are important in the world, the fact that people don’t believe in statistics is pretty important.”