The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

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.

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.

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.