The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World (181 POCHE)

by Michael Lewis

Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.

I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

He marveled again—“at how easy it is to shift from an efficient killing machine to compassionate human being, and how quick the switch may be.”

‘People are not so complicated. Relationships between people are complicated.’

Our stereotype of randomness lacks the clusters and patterns that occur in true random sequences.

“There is much evidence showing that, once an uncertain situation has been perceived or interpreted in a particular fashion, it is quite difficult to view it in any other way.”

“We often decide that an outcome is extremely unlikely or impossible, because we are unable to imagine any chain of events that could cause it to occur. The defect, often, is in our imagination.”

People’s minds coped with loss by drifting onto fantasy paths, where loss never occurred.

Amos couldn’t help himself from wounding Danny, and Danny couldn’t help himself from feeling wounded.

“The problem,” says Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy, “is that psychologists think economists are immoral and economists think psychologists are stupid.”