The Undoing Project
By Michael Lewis
W.W. Norton
362 pp; $38.95
If you look up “List of cognitive biases” in Wikipedia, you will find an exhaustive – and mildly terrifying – list of the ways human beings tend to see the world not as it is, but as we want it to be. And there, in footnote after footnote, you will also find the names of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.
Starting in 1969, these two Israeli psychologists started tearing apart assumptions about how we made decisions and judged probabilities. We are not, it turns out, walking around with little calculators in our head, making instant calculations of profit and loss. Instead, to measure things, we use emotional rules of thumb that are often a poor match for reality. This applies to everything from how we make snap judgments in sport to how we estimate our chances of winning the lottery.
The Undoing Project contains all kinds of fascinating examples of this kind of thing. In the end, though, it is not a book about cognitive psychology, but a love story. Kahneman and Tversky were both extraordinary characters. Tversky, a beaming extrovert, was always the smartest person in any room, but one with little patience for fools or social niceties – he would even skip family holidays if he didn’t like the destination. Kahneman, a fretful introvert, was even smarter, but could never bring himself to believe it.
During his time in the Israeli military (The Undoing Project is, among other things, an excellent history of that nation), he transformed its system of officer selection after proving existing tests were worse than useless – only to abandon the field of personality testing because he doubted he had any talent for it.
But what really mattered about Kahneman and Tversky was the fire they lit in each other. The intellectual bond was so important that Tversky even followed his friend to the United States – a move that also brought the slow ruin of the relationship, as garland after garland was laid at the feet of the charismatic Tversky while his co-author seethed on the sidelines.
At his best, Lewis engages both heart and brain like no other author
This is a book about unconscious biases, but as a reviewer, my biases are very much conscious. Kahneman’s summary of his life’s work, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is one of my favourite books from the past decade. And the man telling the story, Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball and The Big Short, is perhaps my favourite writer full stop. But these are, paradoxically, the very reasons that The Undoing Project ends up a slight disappointment.
At his best, Lewis engages both heart and brain like no other author, and he tells the story of Tversky and Kahneman beautifully – if the start is a little dry, the final sections will have you weeping. But if you have already read Thinking, Fast and Slow or Freakonomics, or any of a handful of other recent bestsellers, the ideas that resulted from their collaboration, the statistical riddles that Lewis reproduces, will feel familiar. We all know now that humans are irrational, biased creatures rather than the rational actors of the textbooks. Tversky and Kahneman have won their war.
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You can hardly blame Lewis for any of this, or accuse him of jumping on a bandwagon. He spent five years persuading Kahneman to let him write it, and years before that watching him agonize over Thinking, Fast and Slow. But there is another irony that undermines The Undoing Project. Both Tversky and Kahneman were skeptical of history and biography. They proved not only that our memories play tricks, but that analysis of the past tends to be misleading, not least because we retrospectively turn possibilities into inevitabilities.
Whether or not its subjects would accept its validity, The Undoing Project is a fine book. If you care about ideas, or the underpinnings of human nature, you should read it. But Lewis’s book works best as a companion and a complement to Kahneman’s own Thinking, Fast and Slow – a case, like Christopher Ricks on Bob Dylan or Francois Truffaut on Alfred Hitchcock, of one master being inspired by another.
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