The Undoing Project – A Friendship that Changed our Minds Paperback – 31 Oct. 2017

I pre ordered this book because a couple of Michael Lewis’s previous books had proven compelling reads and because the book was about the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, had fascinated and stimulated me.One of Michael Lewis’s books I had previously read was Moneyball about Oakland Athletics quest to find new and better players. They did not have the money of other clubs to spend on the most expensive players but they developed systematic ways of finding value where baseball experts (management, talent scouts, journalists) did not find it.But after Moneyball was published, Michael Lewis realised that he was telling a more general story - about the way the human mind worked when it was forming judgements and making decisions under uncertainty. He discovered that a pair of Israeli psychologists - Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - had developed theories on the limitations of rational man, assumed by economists, when making decisions under uncertainty.This is a very personal story of the dire circumstances of the two refugees raised in Nazi Europe and Russia who met in the young state of Israel. They develop a tight working relationship and produced insights into human behaviour based on empirical evidence. They assiduously tested all their ideas on their students so their theories were soundly based on evidence in contrast to much conventional psychological and philosophical work.In the 1960’s Israel which was in constant war conditions with the British and then the Arabs. Danny and Amos were active service soldiers as well as psychology students/ teachers personally involved in close combat fighting and with close friends dying. In these dire circumstances, Danny was already developing his theories about human behaviour and decision making. The Israeli Defence Force recognised the value of his work and put Danny in charge of army personnel selection at the age of 19.Michael Lewis describes the way their work was developed through complimentary talents and rigorous testing of each other's ideas. “There are geniuses who work on their own says Danny. I am not a genius. Neither is Tversky. Together we are exceptional.”Their underlying idea was that the mind has the mechanisms for making judgements and decisions that are useful but capable of generating serious error. They identified heuristics, for example availability, conditionality, anchoring , hindsight, simulation heuristics, that lead to systematic bias. The rules of thumb people use to evaluate probability lead to misjudgement.As formal decision analysis was based on quantification, they tried formulating their estimates of misjudgement statistically. They presented to Israel's Foreign Ministry experts estimates that the effect of the failure of Kissinger's negotiations were a 10% increase in the chance of war but they were ignored. They concluded "No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story"So compelling stories Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky produced. And this book is Michael Lewis’s compelling story of the origin and development of their stories.

Good read, wide research band, thought provoking and humorous about their life stories that influenced the research. Wish I read this before reading thinking fast and slow

A very typical Michael Lewis book: take a very interesting subject, but then approach it through the biographies of the practitioners and talk about the subject in the context of the lives, rather than tackling the subject matter head-on, and all of it done in a very easy and readable way. The drama of the lives of Kahnemann and Tversky - and there was plenty of drama, including the Holocaust and the various Arab-Israeli wars - and the dynamics of their quite complicated relationship are used to move the reader between the psychological breakthroughs that they made, which are full of interest in themselves. The ideas are so powerful that despite their great influence already, it is equally clear that their ideas still have a long way to work through our society before you could actually say they have been adopted - pick any article or tweet by any political journalist (for example) and see pretty much every systemic mistake made by either the journalist or by those who comment under the line; or in some cases, the fairly knowing manipulation of one of the identified effects.For a ground-breaking book, I felt that Kahnemann's Thinking Fast & Slow Thinking, Fast and Slow was such an easy and interesting read that it seems a pity not to tackle the source material directly - just as much of Bill James' writing was in the case of Moneyball - so I would recommend reading it if you are interested in the subject. But for those who prefer to engage with the ideas through the medium of biography, this is a really good read.

Lewis spent a lot of time with Kahneman and none with Tversky (since the latter was dead) so the book presents their friendship from K's point of view. Mostly this is clear and OK but the underlying bias is disturbing. Parts of the book are interesting, but it is a little too much a hymn to K and not a good description of the work they did together. This is a subject I know a lot about and Lewis does not do justice to what K achieved -- and did not achieve. An interesting read and worth reading but not on a par with Moneyball or The Big Short (where Lewis seemed much more in his element).

Michael Lewis's latest book is an ode to the great Amos Tversky and his even greater friend Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli psychologists who won the Nobel Prize for inventing Behavioural Economics. He weaves their decades long collaboration and friendship with their discoveries about how we think in his usual seamless web. This is very rewarding for anyone who has read Kahneman's great Thinking Fast and Slow (see my review), and I assume it plays well for strangers to their work.For those unfamiliar, the two men founded a new type of psychology, frustrated that the Freudian and Behavioural models were not actually true about human nature. Kahneman started it off by creating a new way to recruit Israeli officers by discounting the biassed views of interviews and relying on a set of criteria he defined as discriminating. It worked so well that the Israelis have used it since 1954, and it has been copied by many other countries. Their fundamental insight, that there are heuristics or basic biases that effect human judgement, is now widely accepted as true - and they may seem a bit banal until you think about what they mean. We are NOT rational. Our judgements are part of the flawed 'fast' mind - the one Kahneman brings to vivid life in the aforementioned book.Lewis is his usual self, stripping away the layers of the story to reveal the truth. He is a unique talent - a journalist smart enough to 'get' this kind of material, and talented up to serve it up in first rate prose.A must read for anyone with a brain.