## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Lewis]] - Full Title: The Undoing Project - Category: #books ## Highlights - Later, when he was a university professor, Danny would tell students, “When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it. ([Location 976](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=976)) - “The difference between Danny and the next nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine psychologists is his ability to find the phenomenon and then explain it in a way that applies to other situations,” said Dale Griffin, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia. “It looks like luck but he keeps doing it.” ([Location 983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=983)) - Nature had called, psychology had answered. ([Location 1042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=1042)) - His father had turned away from an early career in medicine, Amos explained to friends, because “he thought animals had more real pain than people and complained a lot less.” ([Location 1062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=1062)) - Amos was fond of saying that interesting things happened to people who could weave them into interesting stories. ([Location 1066](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=1066)) - But what were you supposed to say when Danny brought in a copy of a doctor’s prescription from the twelfth century, sloppily written, in a language you didn’t know a word of, and asked you to decode it? “Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know,” said one of his students. “Danny took that idea and ran with it.” ([Location 1811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=1811)) - When people make judgments, they argued, they compare whatever they are judging to some model in their minds. How much do those clouds resemble my mental model of an approaching storm? How closely does this ulcer resemble my mental model of a malignant cancer? Does Jeremy Lin match my mental picture of a future NBA player? Does that belligerent German political leader resemble my idea of a man capable of orchestrating genocide? The world’s not just a stage. It’s a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You have some notion of a parent population: “storm clouds” or “gastric ulcers” or “genocidal dictators” or “NBA players.” You compare the specific case to the parent population. ([Location 2409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=2409)) - Amos liked to say that if you are asked to do anything—go to a party, give a speech, lift a finger—you should never answer right away, even if you are sure that you want to do it. Wait a day, Amos said, and you’ll be amazed how many of those invitations you would have accepted yesterday you’ll refuse after you have had a day to think it over. A corollary to his rule for dealing with demands upon his time was his approach to situations from which he wished to extract himself. A human being who finds himself stuck at some boring meeting or cocktail party often finds it difficult to invent an excuse to flee. Amos’s rule, whenever he wanted to leave any gathering, was to just get up and leave. Just start walking and you’ll be surprised how creative you will become and how fast you’ll find the words for your excuse, he said. His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said. Everything that didn’t seem to Amos obviously important he chucked, and thus what he saved acquired the interest of objects that have survived a pitiless culling. One unlikely survivor is a single scrap of paper with a few badly typed words on it, drawn from conversations he had with Danny in the spring of 1972 as they neared the end of their time in Eugene. For some reason Amos saved it: People predict by making up stories People predict very little and explain everything People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts The handwriting was on the wall, it was just the ink that was invisible People often work hard to obtain information they already have And avoid new knowledge Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe In this match, surprises are expected Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable ([Location 2600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=2600)) - Bad things even happened to people when they pressed hospital elevator buttons. Redelmeier had actually co-written an article about that: “Elevator Buttons as Unrecognized Sources of Bacterial Colonization in Hospitals.” For one of his studies, he had swabbed 120 elevator buttons and 96 toilet seats at three big Toronto hospitals and produced evidence that the elevator buttons were far more likely to infect you with some disease. ([Location 2847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=2847)) - “You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything all at once. That’s when you need to stop and check your thinking.” ([Location 2882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=2882)) - The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. ([Location 3081](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3081)) - It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place. ([Location 3082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3082)) - “Military psychology is alive and well in Israel,” concluded the United States Navy’s reporter on the ground. “It is an interesting question whether or not the psychology of the Israelis is becoming a military one.” ([Location 3244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3244)) - “The war was totally unexpected. We were just thinking maybe it’s the end of us.” In a matter of days the Israeli army had lost more men, as a percentage of the population, than the United States military lost in the entire Vietnam War. The war was later described by the Israeli government as a “demographic disaster” because of the prominence and talent of the Israelis who were killed. ([Location 3248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3248)) - Exactly how some decision analyst would persuade any business, military, or political leader to allow him to edit his thinking was unclear. How would you even persuade some important decision maker to assign numbers to his “utilities”? Important people didn’t want their gut feelings pinned down, even by themselves. ([Location 3334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3334)) - Danny was stunned: If a 10 percent increase in the chances of full-scale war with Syria wasn’t enough to interest the director-general in Kissinger’s peace process, how much would it take to convince him? That number represented the best estimate of the odds. Apparently the director-general didn’t want to rely on the best estimates. He preferred his own internal probability calculator: his gut. “That was the moment I gave up on decision analysis,” said Danny. “No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.” ([Location 3357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3357)) - By the summer of 1973, Amos was searching for ways to undo the reigning theory of decision making, just as he and Danny had undone the idea that human judgment followed the precepts of statistical theory. ([Location 3454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3454)) - War and politics were never far from Amos and Danny’s minds or their conversations. They watched their fellow Israelis closely in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war. Most regretted that Israel had been caught by surprise. Some regretted that Israel had not attacked first. Few regretted what both Danny and Amos thought they should most regret: the Israeli government’s reluctance to give back the territorial gains from the 1967 war. Had Israel given back the Sinai to Egypt, Sadat would quite likely never have felt the need to attack in the first place. Why didn’t people regret Israel’s inaction? Amos and Danny had a thought: People regretted what they had done, and what they wished they hadn’t done, far more than what they had not done and perhaps should have. ([Location 3553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3553)) - “The absence of definite information concerning the outcomes of actions one has not taken is probably the single most important factor that keeps regret in life within tolerable bounds,” Danny wrote. “We can never be absolutely sure that we would have been happier had we chosen another profession or another spouse. . . . Thus, we are often protected from painful knowledge concerning the quality of our decisions.” ([Location 3571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3571)) - “The greater sensitivity to negative rather than positive changes is not specific to monetary outcomes,” wrote Amos and Danny. “It reflects a general property of the human organism as a pleasure machine. For most people, the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object.” It wasn’t hard to imagine why this might be—a heightened sensitivity to pain was helpful to survival. “Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle,” they wrote. ([Location 3655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3655)) - “I have vivid memories of running from one article to another,” says Thaler. “As if I have discovered the secret pot of gold. For a while I wasn’t sure why I was so excited. Then I realized: They had one idea. Which was systematic bias.” If people could be systematically wrong, their mistakes couldn’t be ignored. The irrational behavior of the few would not be offset by the rational behavior of the many. People could be systematically wrong, and so markets could be systematically wrong, too. ([Location 3857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=3857)) - Danny now had an idea that there might be a fourth heuristic—to add to availability, representativeness, and anchoring. “The simulation heuristic,” he’d eventually call it, and it was all about the power of unrealized possibilities to contaminate people’s minds. As they moved through the world, people ran simulations of the future. ([Location 4093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=4093)) - Alone in Vancouver, Danny was gripped by his new interest in the distance between worlds—the world that existed and worlds that might have come to pass but never did. Much of the work he and Amos had done was about finding structure where no one had ever thought to look for it. ([Location 4100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=4100)) - In the last notes he made on the subject, he called it “Shadow Theory.” “The major point of shadow theory,” Amos wrote to himself, “is that the context of alternatives or the possibility set determines our expectations, our interpretations, our recollection and our attribution of reality, as well as the affective states which it induces.” Toward the end of his thinking on the subject, he summed up a lot in a single sentence: “Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.” ([Location 4261](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=4261)) - what is a marriage if not an agreement to distort one’s perception of another, in relation to everyone else? ([Location 4576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01GI6S7EK&location=4576))