The Undoing Project

Michael Lewis is someone I really enjoy reading. I was super excited when they made The Big Short into a movie, even though I've never seen Moneyball. I decided to pick up his latest, The Undoing Project, and read it right when came out rather than years later. Part of my attempt to stay up with current events I suppose. When I picked it up, I was also pleasantly surprise to discover that Lewis had dedicated the book to Dacher Keltner, who was one of the teachers of the course on Happiness that I took at Berkeley via Coursera. (Great resource everyone should avail themselves of, MOOCs.) He's one of a growing number of psychologists looking at how we can optimize for positive mental states rather than study pathological ones. That this is a recent revolution really says something dark about the profession.

Lewis's book is, in the main, a bromance. It focuses on the academic collaboration of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They're two Israelis who contributed to psychology, specifically the psychology of decision making, to show how systematically bad people can be at it while believing exactly the opposite. It's a fascinating read and I found myself tearing up a bit as their relationship falls apart toward the end. Sometimes things are more than just the sum of their parts. Sometimes together we can be something more.

Psychology is a profession inextricably interwoven into the military industrial complex and Kahneman and Tversky bear this out. Well into their academic careers they would still jump on the first plane home whenever Israel went to war. Kahneman, in particular, was also instrumental in instituting a number of psychological aptitude tests for the various branches of the Israeli military during it's early years. Lewis makes no attempt to hide this side of them, and mostly uses the experiences to frame the rest of their work.

Michael Lewis is really at his best telling the stories of nerds triumphing over conventional wisdom and he continues that trend in the current work. Definitely worth a read!