The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (March 2017)
The Undoing Project is Michael Lewis's newest release. The author of two of my favorite books, Lewis guides readers through the careers of Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (1). Though much space is devoted to describing the formation and application of their many ground-breaking ideas, for me the attention Lewis gives to their friendship and how it was impacted by their desire to produce great work was the best part of the book.
I've written a little bit about this book and I suspect I will revisit it again in the near future. So, to minimize potential repetition of ideas, I'll dust off a method I employed for Tim Harford's Messy and run down a quick top-ten of my favorite thoughts from the work. (2)
In no particular order:
1) Confidence about uncertain things is a sure sign of fraudulence.
2) Big decisions tend to be influenced by circumstance more so than little ones. Thus, the kind of professional one is might be more revealing about a person's character than the profession itself.
3) In real life, people show their preference for 'the sure thing' by opting to do nothing. Nothing is surer than the status quo.
4) Reforms create winners and losers. To get losers to accept change, understanding the source of resistance and addressing it is a better strategy than bullying or arguing.
5) Those who leap to causal explanations for any discrepancy from expectation will fail to see sampling variation in action.
6) A prediction is a judgment incorporating uncertainty.
7) People respond to the way probabilities are framed much in the same way they respond to the probabilities themselves. Patients, for example, opted for surgery much more frequently when told it had a 90% chance of survival instead of a 10% chance of death.
8) Doctors are challenged to balance the individual patient's needs with the aggregate. One person will benefit from antibiotics but any resulting strains resistant to treatment will hurt the population.
9) Inability to waste minutes leads to wasted hours.
10) Revisionist history revolves around changing the unusual. Many speculate on how history would differ if Hitler became an artist; very few consider what would change if he were born a girl.
And a special bonus for you, reader- here is a link to a cartoon skewering the concept of 'psychologists studying psychology'.
I enjoyed reading The Undoing Project. Lewis is excellent at observing without intruding and those skills fit perfectly to what was required for this work. The tangential descriptions of how the ideas this pair came up with were few but relevant. I would recommend this to anyone who has enjoyed one of Lewis's past works or is interested in the psychology of our decision-making processes.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. Two favorite books?
Moneyball, a book I've covered a bit on this space already, and The New New Thing, which I have not. If you looked at my favorite books over time in a similar way to the New York Times bestseller list or the Billboard music charts, Moneyball reached a higher peak position (it was my favorite book for a few years) but The New New Thing has retained its high ranking for a longer period of time.
The Undoing Project is more like The New New Thing. The book is about Jim Clark, founder of three different billion dollar companies, and his journey to find his next project. Lewis focused on the man instead of his ideas which is more like The Undoing Project than it was like Moneyball.
2. So this book is like Messy?
Not exactly. Harford's book is a common type of popular nonfiction because it brings together a lot of different anecdotes and weaves them loosely into a broad theme.
The Undoing Project, with the exception of chapter one, focuses on the two men. Though there are a lot of different ideas throughout, it is a natural result of studying and writing about the careers of two people who came up with a lot of ideas.
