The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Popular writers like Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell sometimes get a bad rap from purists who regard them as popularizers and simplifiers of complex ideas, and that their simplifications do an injustice to the subtleties and deep thinking that go into the original work that they are summarizing and describing. In the case of Michael Lewis' new book, The Undoing Project, that sort of puristic arrogance would be completely out of place. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formed an intellectual partnership from which an entirely new mode of thinking about the limits of human rationality and decision-making has led to a new academic discipline that now goes by the name of 'Behavioral Economics'. Almost by accident, Kahneman and Tversky, two Israeli psychologists with a shared interest in the psycho-dynamics of decision-making, discovered to their mutual surprise that each had skills and aptitudes that the other needed in order to make their ideas about the psychology of decision-making come alive. Amos was the extrovert, a mathematician whose approach whose approach to decision-making was grounded in mathematically-described similarity, measurement, and probability theory. By contrast, Danny Kahneman was the fearful and anxious introvert, and a Holocaust survivor. Where Amos Tversky was fixated on establishing the mathematical foundations for human decision-making, Kahneman's perspective was much broader, and much more subtle, focusing on cognitive biases and other ways in which people fool themselves into thinking that they are acting rationally, when in fact they are not. Of the two, Tversky was the intellectual star, a penetrating intelligence that could analyze and unpack any sort of problem into its component parts; but it was the humanistic Kahneman that made behavioral economics and its underlying psychology accessible to the world. Together, Tversky and Kahneman collaborated in research studies into why people so often acted irrationally when they so easily could have made better decisions that would have conformed more closely to logical rationality. Logic, rationality, and past experience might point in one direction; but somehow people made decisions based upon other criteria, and psychologist wanted to find out why such flawed decision-making so often occurred. Michael Lewis tells a wonderful story about how Kahneman and Tversky worked together for nearly three decades. In fact, so closely do they work together that neither could tell where their individual contributions to their joint work began or ended. Each brought his respective strengths and weaknesses to that partnership; and in the end, when Kahneman felt himself slighted by others within their profession giving principle credit to Tversky for their joint efforts, he ended his collaboration with Tversky on a note of bitterness. Not surprisingly, with their friendship in tatters and each of them seeking other people to work with, neither of them did as well as he had when they were working together. Amos Tversky died of cancer in 1996; and in the end there was a sort of rapprochement between them, but it wasn't really the same. The irony is that in 2002, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for the work that he and Tversky did over the preceding decades. Had Tversky lived, he most assuredly would have shared that Nobel Prize with Kahneman, as the contributions of each of them were essentially two sides of the same coin. I have to confess that I actually read 'The Undoing Project' cover to cover over a period of two days; but I could only do so because I had spent what amounted to weeks pouring over Kahneman's 2011 book, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow', reading and re-reading much for three and four times as I absorb what Kahneman had to say about the psychology of human decision-making under conditions of adversity and uncertainty. That said, I would also have to give a shout out to Michael Lewis for the way in which he described the ideas that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky so brilliantly developed in their long collaboration. Not too many people I know would be willing to plow through Kahneman's catalog of cognitive biases and other cognitive impediments to rational thinking and decision-making, all in one fell swoop. Lewis makes it easy, or at least seemingly so. What is important is that the reader gets a clear understanding of the changes in both psychology and in economics, and in business decisions, that's Tversky's and Kahneman's seminal work has made as part of the business and economics canon that we read about today. In the three weeks or so in the run-up to the December 6, 2016, release date for 'The Undoing Project', I noted that the New York Times had three separate articles summarizing Lewis' book, and why they considered it so important. To the Times' endorsement, I would add my own. Lewis spends a great deal of time and effort to make the ideas that Tversky and Kahneman developed accessible to people who are nonspecialists, i.e., general readers who have an interest in the subject, but who could easily become lost in the mathematics or the professional jargon that so often accompanies these types of intellectual developments. He writes about the things that people know about – sports, athletes, and the stuff we read about in the newspapers daily, and maybe wonder why things turned out as they did, or did not, as the case may be. I liked it, and I think most people will like it also. Best of all, I think readers will see a bit of themselves and all of the discussion that there is about why people, even the smartest of us, frequently make poorly thought out decisions, and how we can make better ones.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, by Michael Lewis, is a well-written story about two people who developed some important ideas. This book is a well-told story, but that’s both its strength and its weakness. The story is about the ideas and relationship of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They are two Israeli psychologists who wrote a paper that was published in the journal Science in 1974 about the systematic ways that we often make mistakes in our thinking and decision-making. Knowing that, here are some ideas about who will like this book. Who Should Read This Book If you’ve heard something about heuristics and biases in decision-making, or if someone has recommended that you read Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, but you don’t know if you’re quite ready for that, this book will be a great read. By telling the story about the development of the ideas that Kahneman and Tversky produced, you get a brief introduction to most of them and to why they’re important. If you like good stories about how creative people work together to produce great things, you should like this book, too. Kahneman/Tversky’s relationship was what some psychologists call a “fertile pair.” It is as much an intellectual marriage as it is a partnership, and the story of the relationship is intertwined with the development of both the ideas and the participants. If what you want is a simple introduction to heuristics and biases in decision-making, this probably won’t do the trick. It’s the story of how two psychologists developed their thinking, so you’ll pick up some things, but it’s the story of the relationship of Tversky and Kahneman and not a treatise on heuristics and biases. What’s in the Book Lewis opens the book with a story about Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, and how he set out to use data to improve the decisions involved in running that team by basing those decisions on evidence, data. He quickly discovered that while data was important, there seemed to be problems in the way that people used data, the way they think. No matter how good the data is, human beings make predictable and systematic errors in the way we think and make decisions. The work of Tversky and Kahneman is all about those predictable and systematic errors. From the Rockets, Lewis takes us to World War II and occupied Paris to introduce us to the young Daniel Kahneman. He migrates to Israel where he and Amos Tversky meet. Kahneman is quiet and self-effacing and French. Lewis describes Tversky as “a swaggering sabra. They form one of the most productive partnerships in modern science, even though they are very different people. That difference is a source of tension and problems, but it’s also the source of the rich ideas they developed together. Because it’s a story about their relationship and not a book about decision-making, Lewis leaves out a lot. For example, if you only read this book, you will think that Kahneman and Tversky coined the phrase “heuristics.” (Location 2407) That’s not the case. One of my majors in college was Management Science. I learned there were basically three kinds of problems. Some problems could be reliably solved with a recipe. If you got the right ingredients and put them through the right process, you would get a reliably good solution. Other problems required creative solutions because they were unique. Between those two, there was a class of decisions which I learned could be solved with heuristics, which were defined as guidelines or rules of thumb. Don Sull’s recent book, Simple Rules, is a good introduction to that way of thinking. Lewis is writing a book about Kahneman and Tversky and their relationship and their work. He includes things which help tell that story. He leaves out thing which don’t help move the story along. And he does everything he can to help us see the world through the lens of the Kahneman/Tversky relationship. Take the case of Gerd Gigerenzer. He’s a German psychologist. If the only thing you read about him is Lewis’s book, you’ll see him as an irrational and jealous opponent of Kahneman and Tversky. But that’s not the whole story, by a long shot. Gigerenzer comes from the point of view of Herman Simon, the American psychologist who gave us the terms “suboptimize” and “satisfice.” Gigerenzer starts from the idea that humans have bounded rationality and he sees heuristics (decision rules) as a way to make decision-making in certain situations better and faster. You might want to know more about his background, and thoughts, but Michael Lewis only gives you the part of his work that’s relevant for his story about Kahneman and Tversky. Bottom Line If you want to read a great story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the ideas they developed, pick up this book and read it. You’ll love it. If all you want is an introduction to those ideas without the story of their development, read Kahneman and Tversky’s 1974 paper from the journal Science. The title is “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” The basics that they outline there still rule a lot of the discussion. If you want a brief but helpful discussion of heuristics as guidelines or rules of thumb, pick up a copy of Don Sull’s book, Simple Rules. If you want to go deep into Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas, you’re going to have to pick up Kahneman’s great book, Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s a book that will take some effort to read because the ideas are dense, and even though they are well-presented, they’re not cloaked in the clothes of story. If you’re willing to do the work, though, Thinking Fast and Slow may be one of the most important books you ever read. It’s that importance that spurred Michael Lewis on to writing The Undoing Project.

We understand a lot more about how we make decisions, the kinds of mistakes we seem to make and how we experience our world thanks to Danny and Amos, two grandsons of rabbis who lost their religion. These two men taught us that we are not natural statisticians and that our rules of thumb and gut feelings often lead us astray. They explained that we tell ourselves stories about people and things that are representative, that we make judgments based on insufficient data. For example, we often think that a handsome person is smarter. Or—take another example--have you ever decided that a three-year old is going to be a movie star or a doctor? How did you decide that this three-year old will find that profession appealing? Certainly not by using statistics. One of the first things Danny and Amos discovered is that even trained statisticians are not natural statisticians. We all make decisions based not on probability but on stories. And there is more. It turns out we are very, very risk averse. We will do a lot to avoid feeling (or remembering the feel of) pain. Indeed, we are “happy” to experience (on the whole) more pain in order to remember less pain. And we will risk a lot to avoid losing things that we own or think we own. And by think we own, I mean we have an ingrained sense of what we are entitled to. There is a famous case study of monkeys who are all perfectly happy eating cucumbers so long as they all get cucumbers. But the minute some of them got bananas and some got cucumbers the monkeys who got cucumbers threw their cucumbers away in fury. They had no interest in being treated unequally. Humans are the same way. If you treat people equally, we’re OK with that; if you obviously advantage some people over some others, we get mad. Really mad. We know all this thanks to two Israeli psychologists. When we make decisions when very little is or can be known, things are even worse. Then we use shortcuts called framing (the stories we tell to explain an event that often have little or nothing with the decision we have to make) and rules of thumb or gut feelings to make our choices. Not only that but we make decisions by referring to a story or something we recall that we think may be similar. On top of that, because we are really risk averse, we may well end up gambling in a manner that, if were able to look at our own actions from a statistical point of view, we would describe as reckless. But, as I mentioned before, we are not natural statisticians. All of this means that our decisions when little is known (say our decisions in the middle of the 2008 Crash) are uncertain at best. All this probably sounds trite to you. At any rate, you probably heard all or most of these ideas already. They’re everywhere these days. In the New York Times op-eds and in school textbooks on everything from politics to economics to biology. But when Amos and Danny started, this idea of an irrational man was hardly trite at all. The prevailing idea of man at that time was that of a rational being. Smart people believed that we were able to know and order our preferences and if we made irrational decisions it was because strong emotions got in the way of our otherwise unbounded rationality. Amos and Danny turned that view of human nature upside down. Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman were as unlike as two people could be. Danny survived the Holocaust, hiding in various French safe houses, and that experience left him constantly doubting himself. A student’s mean review could throw him into a panic and if his ideas were not working out he would abandon them. Amos, on the other hand, was bold, brash, confident. He filled up the room. To this day, people remember his voice. The psychology they practiced was different too. Amos used formal, mathematical models to characterize and explain human behavior. Danny, Lewis tells us, was a poet who became a psychologist. So Amos and Danny were very different – but different in a way that complimented each other. When these two unlikely people formed a kind of couple—became one mind—as they Danny it, they completely changed our understanding of ourselves. And yet it was the all-too human emotion of jealousy that drove them apart. They reconciled when Amos had only six months left to live. This is a wonderful, human story about a friendship, about human nature, and about us and it is told by a wonderful story teller. I highly recommend it.

This is one of Michael Lewis’s best books yet. The challenge is to tell the story in a way that describes the behavioral biases without the need for technical discussion. Lewis accomplished this fairly well. Early in the book he covers the challenge of scouting players in professional sports leagues. He notes the popularity of the halo effect, where scouts see favorable single attributes and let that impression impact the assessment of other attributes. This is later more broadly categorized as representativeness, one of several heuristics individuals use to make decisions with limited information. Representativeness involves the premature characterization and categorization of an object/event/individual based on some attribute that can be easily identified. Other heuristics mentioned include anchoring, when one takes new information and simply makes adjustments to their initial judgement; availability, when one assigns too much weight to the information readily available to them; and simulation, an emotional bias involving the ease with which one can mentally simulate alternatives to reality. While it is acknowledged that heuristics are often times helpful rules of thumb, they can occasionally lead to systematic error. Representativeness is explained using the ‘Linda problem’, which asks whether it is more likely that Linda is a bank teller or a bank teller and a member of a feminist organization, when all you’re told is that Linda is a feminist. Many respondents chose the latter option, even though the first option contains the second option via a less restrictive description. In other words, if the probability of Linda being a bank teller is 10%, and the probability of her being in a feminist organization is 99%, then the first option has a 10% chance of being correct, while the second has a (10% x 99%) chance of being correct (which is less than 10%). Availability bias is similarly explained using a problem that asks whether a particular book has more words with the form _ _ _ _ ing or _ _ _ _ _ n _. Since words ending in ‘ing’ are easily thought of, respondents chose the first option, ignoring the fact that the second option includes all words that also meet the first option. Availability is explored further, as Lewis explains how Kahneman and Tversky attack practitioners for over-extrapolating from small sample sizes. Consumer decision biases are touched on as well. First, it is explained how individuals do not appear to update probabilistic outcomes using a Bayesian process in real world decision-making. Experimentation has also uncovered the fact that human consumption decisions do not follow laws of transitivity. In other words, if a consumer prefers A to B and B to C, they may sometimes also say they prefer C to A. They ultimately explain this by breaking A, B, and C down into individual features, and analogize a person purchasing A to them really purchasing a bundle of features represented by A. In so doing, they realized that not only are small preferential differences in particular features virtually ignored, but exact comparison is often not possible since different objects have different bundles of features. Additionally, they found that individuals exhibit an endowment bias in exchange transactions, assigning more value to items that they already own simply because they already own it. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Kahneman and Tversky was challenging and offering an alternative to Bernoulli’s utility theory. Utility theory effectively explained certain behavior by labeling individuals as either risk tolerant, risk neutral, or risk averse. If faced with choosing between $50 for free or taking a 50% chance of winning $100 or $0, a risk neutral individual would be indifferent to the decision. A risk averse individual would take the free $50 and avoid the odds, since the utility they get from the first $50 is higher than that of the second $50. Thus individuals do not rely on pure probabilistic payoff odds. However, utility theory has not held up under centuries of scrutiny. Kahneman and Tversky added to this topic with the concept of regret aversion, where individuals place undue weight on potential negative outcomes, and then again with loss aversion, where individuals will actually be willing to take more risk (as a risk tolerant individual would in Bernoulli’s framework) when faced with the same decision as above but with losses instead of gains. In other words, if choosing between an assured $50 loss or taking a 50% chance of losing $100 or $0, an individual who is risk averse on the gains side may choose to be risk tolerant on the loss side. The above discoveries are detailed along-side an interesting story about Kahneman and Tversky’s long personal and professional history together. Overall, very enjoyable.

With no doubt, I had great fun reading “The Undoing Project.” I was introduced to the work of Tversky and Kahneman as a college sophomore in 1988 by my teacher, hydrologist Joseph Harrington, who was a great admirer of their ideas. The beauty of what is now called “Prospect Theory” has inevitably stuck with me since. It is only in retrospect that I have come to understand it was radical for its time. So I swallowed whole “Thinking About Thinking” within a week of having read the Michael Lewis review on Bloomberg. And I’ve since really enjoyed the recent near-autobiography of Richard Thaler’s, as well as many of Dan Ariely’s books. Well, you don’t have to believe me on this, but Michael Lewis actually explains the concepts better! No joke, he really does. And he provides an unbelievably deep, personal and sensitive account of the explosive relationship between the two giants. A very believable account too. The research done by Michael Lewis really shows. He’s had phenomenal access too, it seems. And yet, the book does not hang together terribly well. Chapters 1 and 8 should not have made it into the book, they ought to have been relegated to the pages of Vanity Fair, where the author regularly provides fantastic material. More to the point, what we have here is a bunch of chapters that, chronological order notwithstanding, do not constitute a book. The incredible material, the wonderful expositions, the deep insights are all present and correct, but they fail to meld into a narrative. Even the title of the book, much as it has its roots in the work of Tversky and Kahneman, does not do justice to their contribution. It really pains me to say this, especially because the author’s previous effort, “Flash Boys,” was a genuine five-star book. Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe if I was reading this straight off of “Boomerang” I’d have found it great. As it stands, I’m not sure I could recommend it to the general public. If, on the other hand, you have the remotest interest in Behavioral Economics, you genuinely can’t not read “The Undoing Project” and you are guaranteed to enjoy it.

When my husband told me that Michael Lewis had written a new book about ‘thinking fast and slow’, I couldn’t wait to read it. Daniel Kahneman’s book of the same name had excited me several years ago. In my mind, it had a good deal to do with what I had gotten from reading the first part of Philip Tetlock’s book, Expert Political Judgement, and from Isaiah Berlin’s essay about the Fox and the Hedgehog. The first few pages of The Undoing Project surprised me. They were about sports. I knew that Lewis had written several books about sports, but I had only read two of his books, and they were about the financial world. All the same, the section about sports seemed to be about a new direction in selecting sports stars to play on professional teams, and therefore a different way of building a money-making team out of the raw material of talented athletes. It had more to do with thinking about the team, rather than letting judgement be totally dazzled by the ‘stars’. It seemed to be about what I understood ‘thinking slow’ to mean. I looked forward to reading a book which would tell me a lot about the current thinking in the ‘science’ of psychology. A readable ‘layman’s’ overview of that field (and of economics) has been something I have been looking for, for several years. I believe that I probably did get a fair idea about much of today’s ‘psychological thinking’ from this book, but I’m sorry to say that my reaction to it was much more frustration than excitement. My take-away from reading Kahneman’s book had been that the human mind might be better understood by viewing the ‘thinking ‘ process as a collaboration of two different types of mental function with accessing memory and making judgements. ‘Fast thinking’ was an instant and almost automatic response to stimulation, something akin to how a deer runs when it perceives danger. ‘Slow thinking’ was the mental process of the sceptic, the pulling together of knowledge and conclusions from as many sources of memory as possible and the attempt to reconcile their application to the problem under consideration. Kahneman sometimes seemed to want to classify people as either fast or slow thinkers. But, as I imagined it, virtually all human beings probably use both modes of thought constantly throughout their lives. I thought I could recognize this in myself. It seemed to me that I could see it in my family and in other people that I thought I knew well. I had hoped to read that the science of psychology had responded to Kahneman and Tversky’s work by looking for ways to understand better the processes of human learning and improve the gargantuan system and the very disappointing results of American education. Because, as I and many others see it, the education system is acting to aggravate many of our errors rather than to improve our understanding of many of the most fundamental problems our society is grappling with. Like all of our big systems, the education system is run by ‘experts’ who have been trained and selected by the same system that has produced their expertise. This always limits the ability of ‘insiders’ to understand fundamental weaknesses in their own system. It is the way most large governmental systems have always tried to understand their own problems, and it is probably the reason why all such systems to date have eventually failed. When I was expressing my frustration about the book to my husband, he brought my attention to the fact that the book did touch on Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas about the implications of their book in regard to the education system just as I had hoped they would. But it was in a very brief passage that occurred near the beginning of the book and before my mind had been dulled by reading about the methodology of psychology which was illustrated in a cascade of descriptions of very familiar errors in human thought processes. I had completely forgotten the following passage: ‘After the Yom Kippur war—and the ensuing collapse of the public’s faith in the Israeli government officials—they [Kahneman and Tversky] thought that what they really should do was reform the educational system so that future leaders were taught how to think. “We have attempted to teach people to be aware of the pitfalls and fallacies of their own reasoning,” they wrote, in a passage for their popular book that never came to be. “We have attempted to teach people at various levels in government, army etc. but achieved only limited success.” ‘Adult minds were too self-deceptive. Children’s minds were a different matter. Danny {Kahneman} created a course in judgement for elementary school children, Amos [Tversky] briefly taught a similar class to high school students, and they put together a book proposal. “We found these experiences highly encouraging.” they wrote. If they could teach Israeli kids how to think—how to detect their own seductive but misleading intuition and to correct for it—who knew where it might lead? Perhaps one day those children would grow up to see the wisdom of encouraging Henry Kissinger’s next efforts to make peace between Israel and Syria. But this, too, they never followed through on. They never went broad. It was as if the temptation to address the public interfered with their interest in each other’s minds.’ It seems to me that what may have interfered with their ability to follow through in this direction, may have been their fear of not being taken seriously by their own profession. Their ‘scientists’ need to validate every suggestion by mathematical (in this case statistical) methods. The kind of human thinking which can only be done in language cannot get off the ground in such an environment. If much of mathematics is intuitive, the same can certainly be said of language. Words cannot, by themselves, produce a sense of certainty, but the failure to involve imagination expressed in language produces ‘sciences’ which are sadly lacking in their ability to help solve the most basic of human problems. It is potentially the most promising form of ‘slow thinking’. If anyone needs an illustration of the disfavor ‘slow-thinking’ has fallen into in current times, I suggest they try to remember the public ‘dialogue’ to which we were all subjected during the recent election. It was not only the candidates who failed to show any inclination to engage in meaningful dialogue. The press and virtually all of the commentary took part in the same insane-feeling discussion. Fast-thinking has always been a part of politics, but it is depressing to think that’s all there is.

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis is the nonfiction account of Israeli scientists Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman, whose groundbreaking research on human decision making changed the way we view rationality and affected fields from psychology to economics to professional sports recruiting. The book begins by explaining the Moneyball theory, using the NBA draft as an example. Michael Lewis then takes us through the intimate, intricate, gritty history of Amos Tversy, Danny Kahneman, and a few other key individuals. The bulk of the book is a thorough, honest, raw depiction of a working relationship and friendship that as Lewis describes it, was a romantic relationship minus the physical consummation. Rarely does an author use his or her words so skillfully to enable me to empathize with every character of a story, to feel almost as if I were in their minds. Lewis achieves this with this book. I felt and understood Danny's envious worship of Amos, Amos's naive rejection of Danny as an equal yet his intense need for Danny to make him whole. I was deeply saddened by the break in their relationship, and the bitterness held in Danny's heart, despite the fact that a life-changing experience brought them back together. Michael Lewis also does a great job bringing the science to life, with engaging descriptions and examples, that make the reader feel like they are coming up with and exploring ideas in real time, right along with Amos and Danny. It is a rare person who can bring the science to the level of the broader community without diluting it — Michael Lewis passes this test with flying colors. My only complaints about the book involve plot and character development. The book begins by discussing NBA recruitment and introduces the theory made possible by Amos and Danny's work, and makes a few awkward efforts here and there to reconnect the current story with the opening scene, which was actually quite lengthy. The book ends a bit abruptly, without ever really coming full circle, wrapping up the story back in the realm of NBA recruiting. There is also one character in the book that is described and developed quite well, and then never reappears. Danny, on the other hand, is painted thoroughly early on, abandoned for Amos and other characters, and then comes back later. It took me much longer than usual to read this book, and by the time Danny came back into the plot, I had almost forgotten who he was or why he was important, and why he might be coming back. Nevertheless, the quality of the writing, the rawness and realness of the feelings described herein, the scientific descriptions that do justice to the work without making it sound like Greek, all make this book deserve 5 stars despite the minor faults.

What a great read. Not a perfect read, and if I could give it 4.5 stars, I would. But given the necessity of choosing between 4 and 5, knowing a 5 will help the book get more readers, I'm giving it 5 stars. This is a worthwhile read for anyone who likes to think. Truly, I'd love to see this book be required reading in high school. The book offers two excellent insights: 1. How people successfully work together as partners in intellectual or academic projects, and what can go wrong in such partnerships if they don't put the partnership above their individual needs. and 2. The common ways people make mistakes in thinking and decision making. The book is as much about the relationship between Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, as the work they did. Danny Kahneman went on to win a Nobel Prize for the work, after Amos died. Danny also wrote a book about the work, called Thinking, Fast and Slow which is surely worth reading, and gets deeper than this book into the accomplishments Tversky and Kahneman made in decision theory. But "The Undoing Project" is written by Michael Lewis, the author of "Moneyball" and "The Big Short" and is simply a more enjoyable book to read. If you already know something about decision theory, and only want to dig deep into decision theory according to Danny Kahneman, by all means, buy "Thinking, Fast and Slow." If you are not familiar with Kahneman and Tversky, or not familiar with decision theory, get this book. It is fascinating, well-written, and not shallow. There are some chapters that wander a bit, or a paragraph here and there that could have been better edited. Still, absolutely worth your time. Enjoyable and edifying, rare to have both those qualities in a book.

Extremely well-written, gripping and a fast paced read. Gives amazing insights into the lives of Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky and the whole thought process + events that went into making their life's work. This also works as a simpler summary of Thinking Fast and Slow, as we get to hear it from Michael Lewis who is a great storyteller. If you are short on inspiration or backstory to finish Thinking Fast and Slow, this book is an excellent starting point.

Michael Lewis is amongst my favourite authors. Having read Thinking Fast and Slow a few years ago and having recommended the book to many friends, I was curious about what the author had to say about Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky and the story of their research.. The author starts by writing about NBA. Darl Morey, club manager who uses statistics extensively for recruiting has to interview a boy from Punjab who seems to have a great potential to become a good basket ball player. However, he has not played professional basketball. The choice for Daryl Morey is either going by expert intuition or using data, but there are no statistics as the player is a beginner. The dillema sets the context for the book, biography of 2 men whose work has given us new insights on how the human mind forms judgements and how we take decisions. In the modern world, often the choice is between the intuitive judgement of experts vs judgements based on more numerical and probablistic analysis. Thereafter the author traces the biographies of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Teversky, starting from their childhood, growing up years and early adult life. In the process, he describes their personalities and characters like in a good fiction. They live in Israel and therefore, one cannot miss the wars and the impact of defence forces on the two of them. One fascinating piece is on the attributes that is used by the Israeli defence forces to predict leadership qualities and individuals who will do well as pilots, paratroopers, etc. Even though they are around, however their paths do not really cross each other. They come together by chance. Their collaboration is like adding 1 and 1 to get 11, even though both are smart and exceptional. They are very different individuals, however their strengths are complementary. As the author points out, they also have a lot in common. They ask the right questions, they design new experiments and collect data. The answers and analysis give them new insights on how the human mind makes judgement and takes decisions. One paper leads to the next. They are also happy to revise their views as new data becomes available or as somebody points out a flaw in their analysis. 1001 Their theories and papers are not only for the world of psychologists. They are keen to test out the application/ validity of their in different disciplines. Number of pages are devoted to decision making by doctors with the intuitive diagnosis of experts compared with diagnosis through an algorithm (though developed based on the knowledge of the same experts). As Don Redelmier, who worked with Tversky on the project says “Most physicians try to maintain this facade of being rational and scientific and logical and it’s a great lie.” This is not to do with the intentions, but to do with the way the human beings are designed and limitations of the thinking process. As I understood, human beings do not like to live with uncertainity. Decision making is about predicting an uncertain future. For human beings to take decisions and run, with them, they need to remove uncertainity and paint a definitive picture of the future. While painting the picture of the future, the mind relies on cognitive biases -- availability, representativeness, etc. This is where and how mistakes get made. I guess human decision making capabilities have not evolved for the environment we find ourselves in the 21st century. In its own way, the same theme has been explored in other books such as by Nissim Taleb, Steve Dubner, Jordan Ellsberg, etc, though in different contexts and settings. On the way, we also get gems: - "Intuitive expectations are government by consistent mis-interpretation of the world" - "There is antagonism between perceiving and thinking" - "People do not like to predict, but like to explain" - "The stories we make up in our memories replace probability judgements" - "Wherever there is uncertainty there has got to be judgment,” ...“and wherever there is judgment there is an opportunity for human fallibility.”" One of themes of the books is of 2 people working together and forgetting about their individual contributions. However, as they take decisions to move out of Israel and taking up jobs in different universities, the stress in the partnership commences. Physical distance is never good. Once people try to figure out individual contributions, the partnership starts coming undone. There are no more new questions to be asked. No questions, means no new new answers, no new knowledge. All in all a great book. Great story (stories are always more fun then analysis, even though the story may be misleading), ideas expressed simply and in its own way very funny. I highly recommend the book.

Michael Lewis's latest book is an ode to the great Amos Tversky and his even greater friend Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologists who won the Nobel Prize for inventing Behavioural Economics. He weaves their decades long collaboration and friendship with their discoveries about how we think in his usual seamless web. This is very rewarding for anyone who has read Kahneman's great Thinking Fast and Slow (see my review), and I assume it plays well for strangers to their work. For those unfamiliar, the two men founded a new type of psychology, frustrated that the Freudian and Behavioural models were not actually true about human nature. Kahneman started it off by creating a new way to recruit Israeli officers by discounting the biassed views of interviews and relying on a set of criteria he defined as discriminating. It worked so well that the Israelis have used it since 1954, and it has been copied by many other countries. Their fundamental insight, that there are heuristics or basic biases that effect human judgement, is now widely accepted as true - and they may seem a bit banal until you think about what they mean. We are NOT rational. Our judgements are part of the flawed 'fast' mind - the one Kahneman brings to vivid life in the aforementioned book. Lewis is his usual self, stripping away the layers of the story to reveal the truth. He is a unique talent - a journalist smart enough to 'get' this kind of material, and talented up to serve it up in first rate prose. A must read for anyone with a brain.

Excelente livro. Obviamente não espere a completude do thinking, fast or slow. Mas diversos conceitos de behavior são introduzidos enquanto uma biografia da dupla kahneman tversky é revelada.

Statistics play an inordinate role in our lifes. This is True also in software engineering, and identifying potential psychological causes is thrilling. Teaching statistics in IT classes, and its impact on bug creation, should be mandatory. Overall, à good read. Thank you mr Lewis