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    The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds
    The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds
    The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds

    Written by Michael Lewis

    Narrated by Dennis Boutsikaris

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Bestselling 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’s 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.

    Editor's Note

    Unites Lewis’s works…

    The book unfolds much like a love story without the romance — there is infatuation, distancing, and heartbreak. Ultimately, “The Undoing Project” illuminates one of the 20th century’s greatest collaborations, and the power of two minds becoming one.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateDec 6, 2016
    ISBN9781508229124
    The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds
    Author

    Michael Lewis

    Michael Lewis is the host of the podcast Against the Rules. He has published many New York Times bestselling books, including Liar's Poker, The Fifth Risk, Flash Boys, and The Big Short. Movie versions of The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Blind Side were all nominated for Academy Awards. He grew up in New Orleans and remains deeply interested and involved in the city but now lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their children.

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    Reviews for The Undoing Project

    4/5

    784 ratings51 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a fascinating and enriching read. It explores the history of decision theory and the impact of psychology on economics and policy. The book delves into the complex relationship between the two main characters and their groundbreaking work. It is written beautifully and provides significant insight into the human mind. Overall, it is a must-read for those interested in psychology and the study of people.

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Excellent book & splendid narration. These deserve 5 stars. 3 star rating is primarily for the audio content. Audio seemed to be missing parts. End of each chapter seemed abrupt in many chapters -- the narrator is suddenly cut off mid sentence. I can't tell if it's from scribd or the original recording but this took away from an otherwise enjoyable book.

      3 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      What a fascinating book, written beautifully and read soulfully
    • 4/5
      A great story about a couple of remarkable people who dared! Logic is not always logical.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating story about how researchers got a look into how people think. And how they DON’T.
    • 4/5
      Liked this book. The first part of the book was the most enjoyable for me. The friendship and working relationship between Amos and Danny was very complex. Worth a listen.
    • 5/5
      Give this a listen! There are too many people in the world who aren't aware of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Michael Lewis is a genius storyteller. Give it a listen now!
    • 5/5
      I believe this is a quintessential pre-requisite book to understand "Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow". This book provides a lot of context on the collaboration of the greatest minds of our time. There are interesting stories of collaboration, friendship, psychology, economics and impact of the work of geniuses that are - Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky. Michael Lewis does an excellent job of unwinding this collaboration, exploring the friendship, motivations, and work. Treat this as a meta-book and not an academic one. I am now motivated to explore the areas of choice architecture and how it can be of impact in the technology world. Needless to say, I am also looking to re-read Moneyball and finish reading Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow. A brilliant book and a must read.
    • 5/5
      I had no idea what this book was going to be about, I just picked it somewhat at random as the first book to listen to with my new Scribd account. Fascinating! It held my attention the whole time. I love psychology and the study of people.
    • 4/5
      Normally I prefer just the facts over biography, but the amazing saga of Kahneman & Tversky's love story bromance is almost Shakespearean
    • 1/5
      It looks that the good rating is given by the author fans, maybe if you are already in love with its work you can appreciate it. For a honest ignorant as myself It is really boring,if you enjoy just to read stories, take it under your own risk
    • 5/5
      Years ago, I had been avoiding non-fiction books because I thought that would be to difficult to understand and boring. But it turns out to be as fun as reading a fiction
    • 5/5
      The best Michel Lewis book yet — which is no small praise.
    • 4/5
      Listened to about half and enjoyed it, but felt that I was capturing too little of the information and moved on to music.
    • 5/5
      “And then the phone rang.” - One of best endings to a book, fiction or nonfiction, in a long time. It’s proceeded by an incredible story, well told, that gives its ending such power.
    • 5/5
      nice and superb i like this book.

      enjoy and happy
    • 4/5
      The book was filled with great storytelling and significant insight into the human mind.
    • 5/5
      Fantastic! I knew nothing about psychology but it was a blast to read about the odd, yet delightful pair whose work continues to influence our daily lives for the better.
    • 3/5
      I only reccomend for those interested on the particulars of Danny's and Amos' lives trajectories.
    • 5/5
      Great story about the history of decision theory and how psychology entered the realms of economics and policy. These guys were truly brilliant and the insights they produced in their work and the insights the author explored about their lives made for a really fascinating and enriching read. A really interesting dive into the mind and “cognitive illusions” and the history of the people and the studies that brought them to life.
    • 5/5
      A moving account of a scholarly collaboration that lasted for decades and broke ground for many disciplines. Michael Lewis is a compelling story teller, and what a powerful conclusion he left us with.
    • 4/5
      Interesting bio of two men who changed economics without really intending to do so. This story is more about the relationship between the two men than it is about their work.
    • 5/5
      Surprising story of Daniel Kahneman- the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work that changed the way we think about decision making.
    • 5/5
      A dual biography is an unusual thing, but after reading this, there is no way you could write a life of Danny without Amos or vice versa.

      Read this before "Thinking Fast and Slow". That book is more important, but it doesn't have a story, so it is hard to keep all the ideas in your head. This book shows how one idea came from another, plus you'll know something about these remarkable two people who blew up the foundations of economics and psychology.
    • 4/5
      This is more of a biography then I had expected, and I had to push through the middle - but in the end it was very compelling.
    • 2/5
      nonfiction (sociology/psychology/statistics). I got to chapter 3 but stopped because I wasn't absorbing the text at all--I like Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Levitt stuff, and this seems pretty similar, but I think the psych/statistics stuff would be easier for me without all the warring soldiers context--may have to try this on audio instead.
    • 3/5
      I don't often go down to 3 stars but I have on this one. I say that because I am picky and tend make my book choices based on what others have said about a book or author, both friends and strangers. I had read a few good write ups about this book and was looking forward to reading it.

      However, for me, it didn't pan out as well as I expected. I couldn't quote work out what it was, was it a biography or an elongated article in New Scientist? Not that definitions are overly important but having some kind of framework when reading a book quite of helps to get closer to what the author is trying to get across. If you are reading a biography but think it’s a thriller then you will get the kind of feeling that I had when reading this. There's lots of detail about the mens lives both personal and academic but it doesn't reveal much other than itself. And the long tracts about their work is both interesting and revealing but then what?

      I apologise if this seems garbled but that was kinda how I felt in this, I have not read any other reviews of this book, apart from initial write ups that introduced me to it, so I have no idea if it is just me.

      Either way, good luck if you give it a go.
    • 4/5
      To me, this book is far less about discovering how psychological factors influence economics or anything like that, and much more about criticising every choice you make, whatever subject it is about: choosing your partner, the right job candidate, connecting dots in every way, or...basketball pros. From the book:

      People who didn’t know Daryl Morey assumed that because he had set out to intellectualize basketball he must also be a know-it-all. In his approach to the world he was exactly the opposite. He had a diffidence about him—an understanding of how hard it is to know anything for sure. The closest he came to certainty was in his approach to making decisions. He never simply went with his first thought. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

      Hence, Mr. Morey decided to start questioning things more:

      The limits of any model invited human judgment back into the decision-making process—whether it helped or not. And thus began a process of Morey trying as hard as he’d ever tried at anything in his life to blend subjective human judgment with his model. The trick wasn’t just to build a better model. It was to listen both to it and to the scouts at the same time. “You have to figure out what the model is good and bad at, and what humans are good and bad at,” said Morey. Humans sometimes had access to information that the model did not, for instance. Models were bad at knowing that DeAndre Jordan sucked his freshman year in college because he wasn’t trying. Humans were bad at . . . well, that was the subject Daryl Morey now needed to study more directly.

      This is where some of our human fallacies come into play:

      The mere fact that a player physically resembled some currently successful player could be misleading. A decade ago a six-foot-two-inch, light-skinned, mixed-race guy who had gone unnoticed by major colleges in high school and so played for some obscure tiny college, and whose main talent was long-range shooting, would have had no obvious appeal. The type didn’t exist in the NBA—at least not as a raging success. Then Stephen Curry came along and set the NBA on fire, led the Golden State Warriors to an NBA championship, and was everyone’s most valuable player. Suddenly—just like that—all these sharp-shooting mixed-race guards were turning up for NBA job interviews and claiming that their game was a lot like Stephen Curry’s; and they were more likely to get drafted because of the resemblance. “For five years after we drafted Aaron Brooks, we saw so many kids who compared themselves to Aaron. Because there are so many little guards.” Morey’s solution was to forbid all intraracial comparison. “We’ve said, ‘If you want to compare this player to another player, you can only do it if they are a different race.’” If the player in question was African American, for instance, the talent evaluator was only allowed to argue that “he is like so-and-so” if so-and-so was white or Asian or Hispanic or Inuit or anything other than black. A funny thing happened when you forced people to cross racial lines in their minds: They ceased to see analogies. Their minds resisted the leap. “You just don’t see it,” said Morey. Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things. Over and again in the draft you saw these crystal-clear pictures form in the minds of basketball experts which later proved a mirage. The picture in virtually every professional basketball scout’s mind of Jeremy Lin, for instance. The now world-famous Chinese American shooting guard graduated from Harvard in 2010 and entered the NBA draft. “He lit up our model,” said Morey. “Our model said take him with, like, the 15th pick in the draft.” The objective measurement of Jeremy Lin didn’t square with what the experts saw when they watched him play: a not terribly athletic Asian kid. Morey hadn’t completely trusted his model—and so had chickened out and not drafted Lin. A year after the Houston Rockets failed to draft Jeremy Lin, they began to measure the speed of a player’s first two steps: Jeremy Lin had the quickest first move of any player measured. He was explosive and was able to change direction far more quickly than most NBA players. “He’s incredibly athletic,” said Morey. “But the reality is that every fucking person, including me, thought he was unathletic. And I can’t think of any reason for it other than he was Asian.”

      The above is culled from the very beginning of this book, which is not your average pop-scientific, stats-that-make-you-go-wow book; personally, I care not for economics or anything like that. Not at all.

      However, at its core is lovely writing about the strange and extremely beauteous friendship between Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Both were very different as persons, but as such, they came together and created some great theorems into which I won't delve due to the spoiler-ish nature of that, along with the fact that I could simply not do that stuff justice by describing it. If you feel the need to be properly and sweetly overwhelmed with geeky stuff that's psychology intertwined into choices made—much á la the Oscar-winning film "A Beautiful Mind", although this book makes science come alive in even more profound ways than the simplistic film did—just read this book.

      Something that Tversky's son said kind of defines both Tversky and Kahneman:

      “He loved people,” said his son Oren. “He just didn’t like social norms.” A lot of things that most human beings would never think to do, to Amos simply made sense. For instance, when he wanted to go for a run he . . . went for a run. No stretching, no jogging outfit or, for that matter, jogging: He’d simply strip off his slacks and sprint out his front door in his underpants and run as fast as he could until he couldn’t run anymore. “Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”

      I strongly recommend that you read this book. If not for the science and wow if that, then for a fantastically well-written story about two persons and their lives together. This is a lovely, heartwarming read.
    • 4/5
      This is a mindbender. The ideas presented will have to be revisited. But I could do without revisiting the emotions felt while learning about Danny and Amos.
    • 4/5
      Michael Lewis has written often about applying data and reason to subjects often defined by unfounded "gut instincts". He's the perfect person then, to introduce the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the Israeli scientists who changed the way we think about the way human minds really think. Besides explaining the research, Lewis also lets us see the way these two vastly different men had a way of thinking together that was full of more genius and love than the two of them working alone could ever achieve.

      When you finish his book, you'll start noticing how often Kahneman and Tversky's work on decision theory pops up in areas of design, economics, politics and any other field that depends on an understanding of human psychology. You'll start questioning the reasons for the choices you and others make and you may even understand how people could think that fake news is real and real news fake. Kahneman's book, "Thinking, Fast & Slow" is now near the top of my must-reads.
    • 5/5
      Well told! Details behind the published research (that I've read a whole bunch of!). Story telling as Michael Lewis is very capable of making interesting.