#theundoingproject

I have seen references to some of their work, specifically around how we perceive the pain of a small loss much more than the happiness of a large gain in other places, but this book tells the story of how they arrived at many of these conclusions.  The book was able to interweave stories of Israeli wars with sample questions from graduate student surveys in a way that kept me page turning at a good clip.  

I find the lives of academics truly amazing - I cannot imagine having the attention span to focus on some of the seemingly simple questions that they did for years on end.  Yet, through continued focus, refinement and data gathering, they came up with some pretty amazing conclusions.  They also were just smart as hell.  Psychologist Adam Alter created the Tversky Intelligence Test which was "The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were”.  

I found some of the storytelling a bit disjoined, specifically, the section introducing Richard Thaler that seemed to be setting up more detail, only to have him only briefly mentioned near the books end.  

The last 10% of the book felt like it was edited down to me - I would have preferred it to have the same level of detail as the first 90%, but Lewis did manage to make me shed a few tears and I found the overall ending quite satisfying, though I did keep expecting basketball to come back up.

I need to digest this book more and do more reading on the topic as I think there is a lot of relevance to work at MM.  The idea of the last impression creating a lasting impression is something I can’t stop thinking about.  

My favorite quote was a section of Amos’isms:

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.

Some other highlights:

After seeing the diabolically clever data-based approach taken by the North Carolina legislature in writing laws to make it more difficult for African Americans to vote, the comedian John Oliver congratulated the legislators for having “Money-balled racism.”

On NBA team interviewing a player who had been accused of a domestic disturbance:

When they’d asked the player about it he’d explained, chillingly, that he’d grown weary of his girlfriend’s “bitching, so I just put my hands around her neck and I squeezed. ’Cause I needed her to shut up.

Athletic ability and common sense do not appear to be connected in high performing athletes:

Sean Williams looked like a big-time NBA player and was expected to be a first-round pick—in part because everyone assumed that his ability to get through his junior year without being suspended meant that he’d gotten his marijuana use under control. Before the 2007 NBA draft, he’d flown to Houston, at his agent’s request, to practice his interviewing skills. The agent cut the Rockets a deal: Williams would talk to the Rockets and the Rockets alone, and the Rockets would offer the agent tips about how to make Sean Williams more persuasive in a job interview. 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!”

Funny perspective, and not untrue in my opinion, on consulting:

The consulting firm that eventually hired him was forever asking him to exhibit confidence when, in his view, confidence was a sign of fraudulence.

On how difficult it is for some people to accept statistical evidence over gut feel:

In the spring of 2015, as the Rockets, with the second-best record in the NBA, headed into the Western Conference Finals against the Golden State Warriors, the former NBA All-Star and current TV analyst Charles Barkley went off on a four-minute tirade about Morey during what was meant to be a halftime analysis of a game. “. . . I’m not worried about Daryl Morey. He’s one of those idiots who believe in analytics. . . . I’ve always believed analytics was crap. . . . Listen, I wouldn’t know Daryl Morey if he walked in this room right now. . . . The NBA is about talent. All these guys who run these organizations who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common: They’re a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school and they just want to get in the game.

The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion.

He began with a quote from Pascal, Faith is God made sensible to the heart, then added, “How true!”

“I still remember where I was—the street in Jerusalem. I remember thinking that I could imagine there was a God, but not one who cared whether or not I masturbate. I reached the conclusion that there was no God. That was the end of my religious life.”

The central question posed by Gestalt psychologists was the question the behaviorists had elected to ignore:  “I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen,” he said. “If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.”

Why phone interviews are always better than in person at first:

If an officer thought a soldier physically impressive, he also found him impressive in other ways. Switch the order of assessment, and the same problem occurred: If a person was first judged to be generally great, he was then judged to be stronger than he actually was. “Obviously a halo of general merit is extended to influence the rating for the special ability, or vice versa,” Thorndike concluded; he went on to say that he had “become convinced that even a very capable foreman, employer, teacher, or department head is unable to view an individual as a compound of separate qualities and to assign a magnitude to each of these in independence of the others.” Thus was born what is still called “the halo effect.”

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.”

I need to remember this!

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”

Amos liked to say that stinginess was contagious and so was generosity, and since behaving generously made you happier than behaving stingily, you should avoid stingy people and spend your time only with generous ones.

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.

Things are grouped together for a reason, but, once they are grouped, their grouping causes them to seem more like each other than they otherwise would. That is, the mere act of classification reinforces stereotypes. If you want to weaken some stereotype, eliminate the classification.

“Reforms always create winners and losers,” Danny explained, “and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change?

A bit of stoic philosophy here I think:

When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

“Amos would say, ‘People are not so complicated. Relationships between people are complicated.’

Amos had this thing about titles. He refused to start a paper until he had decided what it would be called. He believed the title forced you to come to grips with what your paper was about.

People find it a remarkable coincidence when two students in the same classroom share a birthday, when in fact there is a better than even chance, in any group of twenty-three people, that two of its members will have been born on the same day.

The imagination appeared to be governed by rules. The rules confined people’s thinking. It’s far easier for a Jew living in Paris in 1939 to construct a story about how the German army will behave much as it had in 1919, for instance, than to invent a story in which it behaves as it did in 1941, no matter how persuasive the evidence might be that, this time, things are different.

Natalie’s philosophy, and usually mine too:

Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away,

“It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.”

“He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises.”

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.

“Last impressions can be lasting impressions.”

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

“The more money one has, the less he values each additional increment, or, equivalently, that the utility of any additional dollar diminishes with an increase in capital.”

When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.

On why getting second is much worse than getting third:

They were uncovering, or thought they were uncovering, what amounted to the rules of regret. One rule was that the emotion was closely linked to the feeling of “coming close” and failing.

what mattered was not the absolute levels but changes.

When choosing between sure things and gambles, people’s desire to avoid loss exceeded their desire to secure gain.