He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, “All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.” He’d heard Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.” Once, after Amos gave a talk, an English statistician had approached him. “I don’t usually like Jews but I like you,” the
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