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The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
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The Undoing Project Quotes Showing 61-90 of 246

"It actually went pretty well, until they got onto the topic of marijuana. "So you got caught smoking weed your freshman and sophomore years," said the Rockets interviewer. "What happened your junior year?" Williams just shook his head and said, "They stopped testing me. And if you're not going to test me, I'm gonna smoke!"
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"They would learn to evaluate a decision not by its outcomes--whether it turned out to be right or wrong--but by the process that led to it. The job of the decision maker wasn't to be right but to figure out the odds in any decision and play them well."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"I remember his words," recalled Amnon. "He said, 'There is nothing we can do in philosophy. Plato solved too many of the problems. We can't have any impact in this area. There are too many smart guys and too few problems left, and the problems have no solutions.'" The mind-body problem was a good example. How are our various mental events—what you believe, what you think—related to our physical states? What is the relationship between our bodies and our minds? The question was at least as old as Descartes, but there was still no answer in sight—at least not in philosophy. The trouble with philosophy, Amos thought, was that it didn't play by the rules of science."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"People treated all remote probabilities as if they were possibilities. To create a theory that would predict what people actually did when faced with uncertainty, you had to "weight" the probabilities, in the way that people did, with emotion. Once you did that, you could explain not only why people bought insurance and lottery tickets. You could even explain the Allais paradox.*"
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"The nice thing about things that are urgent," he liked to say, "is that if you wait long enough they aren't urgent anymore." "I would say to Amos I have to do this or I have to do that," recalled his old friend Yeshu Kolodny. "And he would say, 'No. You don't.' And I thought: lucky man!"
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"Many sentences popped out of Amos's mouth that Redelmeier knew he would forever remember: A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place. Redelmeier"
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"I share your feeling that such behavior is, in some sense, unwise or erroneous, but this does not mean that it does not occur,' Amos wrote to an American economist who complained about the description of human nature implied by 'Value Theory.' 'A theory of vision cannot be faulted for predicting optical illusions. Similarly, a descriptive theory of choice cannot be rejected on the grounds that it predicts 'irrational behavior' if the behavior in question is in fact observed."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"how "intense mental activity hinders perception." They found that it wasn't just emotional arousal that altered the size of the pupil: Mental effort had the same effect. There was, quite possibly, as they put it, "an antagonism between thinking and perceiving."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. "In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one's ticket number is similar to the number that won," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that "the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery," depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.

Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over. But it was of course at its most potent when people might have done something to avoid it. What people regretted, and the intensity with which they regretted it, was not obvious."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"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."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"The paper subsequently written by Amos with Redelmeier* showed that, in treating individual patients, the doctors behaved differently than they did when they designed ideal treatments for groups of patients with the same symptoms. They were likely to order additional tests to avoid raising troubling issues, and less likely to ask if patients wished to donate their organs if they died. In treating individual patients, doctors often did things they would disapprove of if they were creating a public policy to treat groups of patients with the exact same illness. Doctors all agreed that, if required by law, they should report the names of patients diagnosed with a seizure disorder, diabetes, or some other condition that might lead to loss of consciousness while driving a car. In practice, they didn't do this—which could hardly be in the interest even of the individual patient in question. "This result is not just another manifestation of the conflict between the interests of the patient and the general interests of society," Tversky and Redelmeier wrote, in a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. "The discrepancy between the aggregate and the individual perspectives also exists in the mind of the physician. The discrepancy seems to call for a resolution; it is odd to endorse a treatment in every case and reject it in general, or vice versa." The point was not that the doctor was incorrectly or inadequately treating individual patients. The point was that he could not treat his patient one way, and groups of patients suffering from precisely the same problem in another way, and be doing his best in both cases. Both could not be right. And the point was obviously troubling—"
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"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 At first glance it resembles a poem."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

"some of this to a spectacular article about the construction and destruction of the World Trade Center towers by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, published in the New York Times Magazine a few days before the first anniversary of the attacks. William Poundstone's book Priceless offers a more detailed account of the sway room."
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

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