'The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds', by Michael Lewis

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed our Minds, Michael Lewis (3.5)

Mr. Lewis has a knack for writing approachable non-fiction. He is most famous for ‘The Blind Side’, ‘The Big Short’ and ‘Moneyball’. In this book, he tells the biography of two scholars who brought together psychology and math to discover cognitive biases and understand how we value risk and make decisions. Few know their names, but their accomplishments include winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. The first third of the book consists of Lewis’ interest in numbers, and the early biographies of the two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. At this point, Lewis jumps into their various research topics and published theories. Personally, I found the first 30% of the book to be a bit distracting, as I was itching to hear about their work. Once he got into the details, I was not disappointed. Most readers will find the results startling and often disturbing, particularly when attributing the decision processes described to many people in power today. While it’s not hard to believe the average person will think that if a flipped coin has been ‘heads’ for 9 times, the 10^th time will likely be ‘tails’, it is startling to see statisticians make the same mistake! Kahneman and Tversky’s experiments and results are interesting and thought provoking