The Undoing Project Quotes

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World

“Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic universe. In this match, surprises are expected.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The way the creative process works is that you first say something, and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Knowledge is literally prediction,” said Morey. “Knowledge is anything that increases your ability to predict the outcome. Literally everything you do you’re trying to predict the right thing. Most people just do it subconsciously.” A”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“We study natural stupidity instead of artificial intelligence.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Amos was not merely an optimist. He willed himself to be an optimist because he had decided pessimism was stupid. "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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,” said”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“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.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The desire to avoid loss ran deep, and expressed itself most clearly when the gamble came with the possibility of both loss and gain. That is, when it was like most gambles in life. To get most people to flip a coin for a hundred bucks, you had to offer them far better than even odds. If they were going to lose $100 if the coin landed on heads, they would need to win $200 if it landed on tails. To get them to flip a coin for ten thousand bucks, you had to offer them even better odds than you offered them for flipping it for a hundred. “The greater sensitivity to negative rather than positive changes is not specific to monetary outcomes,” wrote Amos and Danny. “It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.” It wasn’t hard to imagine why this might be—a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival. “Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle,” they wrote.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.” “I”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. 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. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion. “The”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“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. “Confirmation”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis,” said Danny. “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” As Danny and Lanir wrote, decades later, after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency asked them to describe their experience in decision analysis, the Israeli Foreign Ministry was “indifferent to the specific probabilities.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The guy walks around with a banana in his ear. And people are like, ‘Why do you have a banana in your ear?’ He says, ‘To keep the alligators away! There are no alligators! See?”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“The failure of decision makers to grapple with the inner workings of their own minds, and their desire to indulge their gut feelings, made it “quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, “I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds