“We exaggerate the infallibility of the mind,” says Michael Lewis author of many great books, few of which have been turned into movies, (”Moneyball”, “The Blind Side” and “The Big Short”.)
In his latest (2016) , “The Undoing project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds”, Lewis explores a friendship and the lessons it has left for us. One of the friends is Daniel Kahneman who got the Nobel Prize in 2002 for the work did in collaboration with his friend and colleague, Amos Tversky. Six years before Kahneman got the award, Tversky died, but by then they had also separated in their academic career, painfully.
Says Lewis, “They (Tversky and Kahneman), are exploring human nature: they way the mind works dealing with uncertainty and they have insights after insights on cognitive illusions: the mental equivalent of optical illusions...how our mind is capable of tricking us in certain circumstances. We have this tool for getting through life for making judgements and decisions...it is not a statistician; it is not comfortable with probabilisitic calculations. What it emotes to is story. It seeks parallels. Often it is good but it has these glitches of making up false stories and finding false parallels.”
Lewis explains, “The central part of their work is that we are wired for fallibility; it is not shameful. The mind makes mistakes like the ear makes mistakes or the eyes...” Lewis explains that we are reluctant to admit its infallibility because, “...for whatever reason we want the world to seem like a more certain place than it actually is.”
“All my books are character-driven and these two people are very interesting people and radically different from each other. People who knew them could not imagine them getting along, much less falling in love with each other.”
Lewis talks of how they together, “...explored the workings of the mind in a scientific way and applied it to medicine, law, government...you know the mind is involved in everything and so they touched every aspect of human life...The relationship was so curious to me because they became different people in each other’s presence.
“Everybody who has ever met Amos has said he is the smartest person they have ever met. He was a tough guy...a war hero and he had an intellect that blew everyone away...Daniel Kahneman has an intellect that not everybody recognizes as breathtaking but Amos recognizes as, ‘a miracle’.”
Lewis continues, “Daniel’s gift is for insight, it is for seeing the mistakes people make and Amos’s gift is for generalising...like saying Oh my God you have actually identified a mistake that is general to our species. They teased out the project over a period of ten years.”
Lewis says,”I did not know psychology, Israel or the wars...There was a lot to learn but the big thing was that I had a sense that I was writing about people whose minds were bigger than mine and I am going to get my mind around them.”
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