The Undoing Project

A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

By: Michael Lewis

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Best-selling author Michael Lewis examines how a Nobel Prize-winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

Forty years ago Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred systematically when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis' own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

The Undoing Project is about the fascinating collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield - both had important careers in the Israeli military - and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. In the process they may well have changed for good mankind's view of its own mind.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2016 Michael Lewis (P)2016 Simon & Schuster

Undoes and Mostly Re-Does Moneyball

Any additional comments?

Like a lot of people, I read and admired Moneyball, Lewis’s breakthrough book about the ways the Oakland A’s used new statistical analyses to get an edge over better-funded rivals. It was a book about a powerful idea wrapped inside a pretty good story: how one baseball team went from irrelevant small market team to shapers of the sport overall. It had all sorts of great vignettes about obscure finds that panned out and sure things that flamed out, and it all worked in the service of a specific goal: to get the A’s a World Series win.

Moneyball was so good, that it begged a sequel. What, I wondered along with a lot of baseball fans, would the next generation of smarter-than-the-market baseball thinking bring us. Even in the years after the book’s release, it was clear that some of the A’s insights were getting out of date. For instance, the steroid era had effectively cheapened power hitting. If you had someone with a good batter’s eye, it was likelier he’d be able to develop home run power with the help of steroids. (And, sadly, the A’s did have a number of notorious steroid abusers, most famously Jose Canseco.) In the (mostly) post-steroid era, power hitting was again more expensive and no longer reflected a market inefficiency. That didn’t make Moneyball wrong; it just meant that the problem Lewis described so skillfully was evolving.

You can see the residue of a Moneyball sequel in this good, but not quite as good Lewis book. The first chapter here shows how Daryl Morey, the Billy Bean of basketball in his role as the GM of the Houston Rockets, tried to remake basketball statistics along Moneyball principles. That much is an obvious sequel, one that a lesser writer than Lewis would likely have jumped on. Instead, though, Lewis “undoes” that notion. He describes how, early on, Morey discovered that no amount of statistics could overcome the need for human judgement on the promise of a basketball prospect. He needed to rely on scouts’ opinions, but he realized scouts’ opinions were necessarily unreliable. It was a choice not of certainty, or even always of better odds than otherwise, but of the need to embrace the uncertainty of human decision-making. It was a matter of “undoing” what we thought we’d done well.

So, in the introduction and chapter two, this becomes a different book. In the introduction, Lewis tells of responses to Moneyball, and singles out a review of the book from Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler that mentions the work of two Israeli thinkers -- Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky – as anticipating what Bean, and even Bill James were doing in baseball. This book becomes Lewis’s answer to Sunstein and Thaler’s review; it becomes his exploration of what Kahneman and Tversky proposed about the fallibility of the human decision-making process.

The ideas the book explores are really interesting ones, and the best parts here come when Lewis renders some slice of them in the clear way he’s so skilled at. I’d heard of confirmation bias, of course, but I get introduced here to all sorts of other decision-making errors. It’s a great experience to realize how easy it is to fall into the errors the two men described, measured, and named.

So the heart of this book is a good nonacademic review of ideas otherwise buried in academic prose. I enjoyed it, and I have the pleasure of feeling smarter for having read it. Still, unlike Moneyball, the great idea(s) isn’t wrapped inside a great story. Lewis spends a lot of time discussing the friendship between Kahneman and Tversky, but there isn’t all that much to it. Set aside the way their lives reflect the early years of the Israeli nation, and this is a story of two opposite personalities who found each other, complemented each other’s thinking, and then slowly drifted apart. There isn’t much meat to it, and that diminishes this as a story.

I give Lewis great credit for excavating his subjects’ work and for refusing to take the easy road to a sequel based on Morey’s experience in basketball. Just as Kahneman and Tversky show us that we have to “undo” much of what we think we know about how our minds work, Lewis “undoes” the obvious book he could have written. The result is something very much worth reading but, as a story that enriches the ideas it explores, it falls short of the excellence of Moneyball.

people are complicated

I can't help but think these two incredible people were just as stupid as the rest of us and their work was a commentary and meta-comedy of life. absolutely incredible.

Vanquish Regret

It was like. being a fly on the wall while intelectual giants captured and quantified how we make choices both large and small. Thank you gentlemen

More than a story of the mind

Like every Michael Lewis book he tells a compelling story of people and their relationships. He also explains the way few can complex ideas in a way that is approachable to those not versed in the field he writes about. This is a great story of two friends wrapped up with a great explanation about their joint discoveries of how the mind sometimes doesn't work the way we have assumed it does.

These guys changed my life and likely saved it too

My Dad took a few college classes. One of which was an excellent psychology class taught by Dr Hubbard at ASU. My dad drilled all of us kids in the truley unique lessons learned there. It is only now, as a retired airline pilot, that I know whose work Dr Hubbard brought into his classroom. Teachers really do touch the future.

Great minds entangled with human psychology

The book is a great story telling in addition to great scientific substance including not only different theories, but also the definition of psychology itself.

Making a difference

Will you become the next Amos or Danny? This is a great love story pictures out to people stumbled into changing the world. I strongly recommend it for anybody who has a passion to improve the lives and to understand human beings.

Great origin story

The ideas of cognitive and unconscious bias have become very big topics at my company. Unconscious bias is used typically to describe ways our prejudices play out in treatment of people. Cognitive bias is the same concept but applied to business problems. This book is a fascinating introduction of both the biases and the people who brought them to widespread awareness. Our company is certainly better off for Kahneman's and Tversky's studies and the considerable work building on their concepts.

Cue Screenplay

Love, love, love this story. Gripping drama, sophisticated and efficient handling of required theoretical detail and yet, in the end, raw humanity. Make a movie of this incredible confluence of hearts and minds.

Heavy and Thoughtful

This is a great story and reinforces the nature of humanity as forever complex and illogical. It’s great to be human. Also, long live collaboration.