Tversky and kahneman, 1974
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
After reading about this book, I pre-ordered it, six months before its release date.
It's about the work of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who published Thinking, Fast and Slow in and his late collaborator, Amos Tversky.
Thinking, Fast and Slow had a big impact on me.
Moreover, The Undoing Project's author is Michael Lewis, of Moneyball and The Big Short fame. That's about all I knew of him.
Around the book's release date there was a flurry of publicity interviews. I watched several, including the long one with Charlie Rose. Michael Lewis could hold his own and articulate his subjects' work.
Besides being a writer of best-selling nonfiction, some of which have been made into popular movies, Michael Lewis has an undergraduate degree in art history and a Master's in economics.
He's worked as a trader, then resigned to write his first book, Liar's Poker, published back in just after he'd turned He became a financial journalist and has written for an array of well-known magazines, including a stint as a senior editor at The New Republic.
This book, The Undoing Project, focuses on the biographies of Kahneman and Tversky, not only on their ideas and work.* That's not why I read it.
That that's what Lewis had to do to appeal to his usual wide readership made me a little cynical. In the book, Daniel Kahneman becomes "Danny." The ups and downs of their relationship and the whys and wherefores of their collaborative creativity are a large part of the book.
The un doing project lewis and taylor The Premonition. He understood me better than I understood myself. Not only that but we make decisions by referring to a story or something we recall that we think may be similar. Amos Tversky, on the other hand, was born in Israel.In my mind's eye I foresee a movie turning the two men into marketable personalities such as Oliver Sacks became in the movie Awakenings. I wonder how "Danny" is feeling about that. Yet that may be the price of cluing more people into their work. The Undoing Project is a best-seller, and Lewis' role here is as a popularizer.
He uses biography with its temporal correlate as one of his organizing principles, proceeding through ideas to some extent in the order they were hatched, but that doesn't necessarily help in the reader's grasping and ordering the ideas.
That's one of my complaints. You won't necessarily be impacted by the ideas. You won't necessarily see that they apply to you, although they do. For that, read Kahneman's own book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Lewis says Kahneman is a star in the classroom, a contention supported by the fact that he's a star in that book, a genius of a teacher.
Kahneman has a subsection in his own book called "CAN PSYCHOLOGY BE TAUGHT?" which I transmuted into the broader question, "Can people be led to look at themselves?" and, on the basis of his book, I answered "Yes."
Another of my complaints about The Undoing Project is the first chapter, which is completely dedicated to basketball.
Although Lewis touches on the ideas he's going to bring out later in the book, the chapter is not that comprehensible to those who don't follow basketball. I guess it's another nod to his general readership.
Now for the good part.
Despite the way the book is organized, the overload of biography, and that opening chapter, Michael Lewis is able to write clearly and succinctly about the cognitive illusions that bias our decisions.
Having been previously introduced to those concepts, I experienced the book as a refresher course, and directly upon plunging in, breathed a sigh of relief as I felt my perspective clearing under its influence.
The book covers the usual territory: heuristics, bias, the weakness of expert judgment relative to algorithms, the cognitive illusions to which humans are subject.
Heuristic: the term coined to reflect quick and dirty rules of thumb that, to a degree, work, except when they don't and lead us astray. For example, the "availability" heuristic: the more easily something comes to mind, the more important and right we think it is.
And, yes, it's science, not theory, that is, all research-based.
Rather than going into a lot of detail to describe it, though, I can attach a link or two, and then use most of my space here to describe some fun parts.
For example, knowledge is prediction.
The un doing project lewis and friends: He was ordered to figure out which candidates for officer training school were most likely to succeed. Related Titles By Michael Lewis. Since the Nobel is not given posthumously, Kahneman was the sole recipient. What saves them or activates them and really makes the difference?
What do you think about that?
In the basketball chapter, Lewis describes how expert intuition failed to predict; hence the relative success of algorithms in giving an advantage to the team depending on them instead of conventional expert judgment.
Transitioning from basketball to baseball, here's an informative review of Moneyball by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, who figure in The Undoing Project.
Surprisingly, when Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball, he'd never heard of Kahneman and Tversky or their work. He cites this review in his introduction. (The picture is of Billy Beane, not Lewis.)
Michael Lewis uses the technique of embedding the stories of various individuals whose careers and lives were impacted by Kahneman and Tversky's work.
That technique I find useful, maybe because I, too, find their work impactful
Richard Thaler†, one of the authors of The New Republic article I linked, is an economist who was having trouble finding his way in a field then based on the assumption that people were rational. The assumption had entailed that although people did err, they were essentially rational; their errors thus could be assumed to be randomly distributed--outweighed and meaningless.
Instead, people's behavior was characterized by systematic error. If error was systematic, it could not be ignored.
Thaler got someone to send him a draft of "Value Theory." He instantly saw it for what it was, a truck packed with psychology that might be driven into inner sanctums of economics and exploded.The logic in the paper was awesome, overpowering. The paper blew a hole in economic theory for psychology to enter. "That really is the magic of the paper," said Thaler, "showing you could do it. Math with psychology in it. The paper was what an economist would call proof of existence. It captured so much of human nature."
That sounds like such a thrill; really gets my iconoclastic juices flowing.
There are so many examples of ways our thinking and decisions are shaped; framing for example: for people, perception of a "loss" depends on framing, which is manipulable. Two monkeys are satisfied when each is rewarded by a cucumber, but let one get a banana and all hell breaks loose. You earn a certain amount that you think is reasonable for work on a project--an amount that is greater than others in your group.
Now say you earn the exact same amount but discover your peers received twice as much. Suddenly the previously sufficient amount is grossly inadequate.
That's just one example but one with which I'd become familiar since framing (or "reframing") had entered the therapeutic lexicon.
Another personage whose life and work surfaces in the book is Donald Redelmeier, a physician, who, as a result of having come across Kahneman and Tversky's work on judgment under uncertainty as a teenager, came to oversee decision-making in a trauma center as a preventive for systematic errors.
The article was called "Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases." It was in equal parts familiar and strange--what the hell was a "heuristic"? Redelmeier was seventeen ykears old, and some of the jargon was beyond him. But the article described three ways in which people made judgments when they didn't know the answer for sure.The names the author had given these--representativeness, availability, anchoring--were at once weird and secudtive. They made the phenomenon they described feel like secret knowledge. And yet what they were saying struck Redelmeier as the simple truth--mainly because he was fooled by the questions they put to the reader. He, too, guessed that the guy they named "Dick" and described so blandly was equally likely to be a lawyer or an engineer, even though he came from a pool that was mostly lawyers.
He, too, made a different prediction when he was given worthless evidence than when he was given no evidence at all. He, too, thought that there were more words in a typical passage of English prose that started with K than had K in the third position, because words that began with K were easier to recall.
The un doing project lewis and clark You earn a certain amount that you think is reasonable for work on a project--an amount that is greater than others in your group. I have ended up an even bigger fan of Kahneman, but of Tversky There are so many examples of ways our thinking and decisions are shaped; framing for example: for people, perception of a "loss" depends on framing, which is manipulable. They appreciate the author's ability to make complex subjects understandable using simple questions and easy-to-understand statistics.
This wasn't just about how many words in the English language started with the letter K. This was about life and death. "That article was more thrilling than a movie to me," said Redelmeier.
Let me not forget to mention that people are geniuses of rationalization. We can't predict what's going to happen, but, once something does happen, we connect the dots to make whatever it was appear to have been inevitable.
An "occupational hazard" of historians, thus, is to connect observed facts into a confident-sounding theory while neglecting the unobserved (or unobservable) facts. A similar hazard for social science experimenters is to take results that contradict the hypothesis and rationalize them, rather than discarding the hypothesis as flawed. Thus it is that talking heads of all sorts can often cover up their errors in prediction and simply keep on talking.
At one point Kahneman and Tversky were enamored of something called Decision Theory, thinking that presidents and prime ministers could be educated and aided in logic like emergency room physicians--until coming up against the fact that powerful people--usually men--mostly had no interest at all in knowing about their mistakes.
Here is a New York Magazine review of The Undoing Project that tells a little more about that, shares an additional quote from the book, and makes the frightening connection to the Age of Trump:
That article makes reference a Social and Behavioral Science Team in the Obama White House.
Yes, most but not all leaders wish to remain oblivious to their gaps in making good decisions: former President Obama had a team in place to aid the government in using the new cognitive knowledge for the common good of the American people, and it remained in place until the last minute. Here's a link to an article about it from the January 23, , issue of The New Yorker:
But, now,
(the) team, if it even continued to exist in the new Administration, would soon belong to one of the most anti-science President-elects in history, who has called climate change a "hoax," spread unproven claims about vaccinations' ties to autism, and mocked new brain-science-backed N.F.L.guidelines to prevent concussions, saying that football had grown "soft."
Sad, what we are losing! Two steps forward and, it appears, a giant step backward.
But we can still learn. Little simple things that make a difference.
Such as (from the same New Yorker article):
The team advised Obama officials on how to quash false claims that the President was a Muslim.(Instead of saying, “No, Obama is not a Muslim”—which simply increased association by repetition—it was better to counter with “Actually, Obama is a Christian.”)
In the Kahneman vernacular, just denying Obama is a Muslim played on the availability heuristic. Even though the content--the words--deny the charge, by repeating it they made it come to mind easier and thus seem more true and relevant.
The second option, stating that Obama is a Christian, interfered. It threw a little bit of a monkey wrench into promulgation of the problematic belief.
This stuff is useful. If this is how our minds work (if that's the sort of thing that is working on our minds, anyway) then what constitutes free will is grasping that knowledge and using it for the sake of better thinking.
Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
There was little advantage in reasoning clearly, while much was to be gained from winning arguments.
Elizabeth Kolbert, "Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds," Issue of February 27,
And here's a new review of The Undoing Project from April 20, , in which the reviewer is concerned about the potential for unconscious manipulation, that is, that cognitive science is being used to manipulate rather than to remove the sources of bias.
But he may be missing the degree to which cognitive science concerns how things are (not pushing how things should be)--that we're already swimming in a sea of pressures and biases--that reason isn't what we think it is.
October 11,
*When I was reading and reviewing this book, I was critical of Michael Lewis' focus on relationship issues.
I even thought that focus was in the service of an eventual movie. But subsequently an aspect of the relationship (and its eventual breakdown) is what has stayed with me.
The two principals had an extraordinarily intense and creative working relationship that they described as instantaneous sharing of ideas and uncritical acceptance as though two people were sharing one mind. Then they moved to another country. One of them got divorced and remarried. They no longer worked at the same university. One of them was more charismatic and impressive and got disproportionately rewarded by the world, so that he became convinced he was the more valuable partner and even began to take sole credit for work they had done together.
Yet the other may have been the main source of their new ideas.
"Amos changed," said Danny. "When I gave him an idea he would look for what was good in it. For what was right with it. That, for me, was the happiness in the collaboration. He understood me better than I understood myself. He stopped doing that" (my italics).
What changes people?
What frees them and lets them be who they are supposed to be? What saves them or activates them and really makes the difference? Something like what was going on with Kahneman and Tversky! But it can't be applied mechanically or as a technique. And it has nothing to do with being "nice."
I don't think I'm in the territory of cognitive psychology anymore.
†Richard Thaler has just won the Nobel in Economics.