Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Michael Lewis

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Biography, Economics, History, Public Policy

362 pages, published December 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Undoing Project highlights the research performed by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which focused on undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind systematically erred when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, and led to a new approach to government regulation. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

Quotes

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice.”

 

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”

 

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

 

“Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”

 

“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.”

 

“It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.”

 

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

 

“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.”

 

“The way it feels to me,’ he said, ‘is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think.  And now I can think them.”

 

“Wall Street trading desks at the end of each year offer a flavor of the problem. If a Wall Street trader expects to be paid a bonus of one million dollars and he’s given only half a million, he feels himself to be, and behaves as if he is, in the domain of losses. His reference point is an expectation of what he would receive. That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses. Danny would later use the same point to explain the behavior of apes in experiments researchers had conducted on bonobos. “If both my neighbor in the next cage and I get a cucumber for doing a great job, that’s great. But if he gets a banana and I get a cucumber, I will throw the cucumber at the experimenter’s face.” The moment one ape got a banana, it became the ape next door’s reference point. The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.”

 

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

 

“There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.”

 

“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.”

 

““He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”

My Take

I am a fan of Michael Lewis, having read Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, Coach, The Big Short, and The Blind Side as well as many of his blog entries on Slate.  I really enjoyed his writing and was therefore looking forward to The Undoing Project which focused on Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Israeli behavioral psychologists who studied how and why we make certain decisions.  While the book was interesting at times, there was a lot of meandering that was less than compelling.  It was definitely not a page turner.  I don’t regret reading it, but am reluctant to give it a big recommendation.