The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

I already adored the work by Kahneman and Tversky and this book is a nice behind the scenes exploration.

Always good, learn about statistical biases

Really enjoyed this book. The conclusion felt a bit rushed, but it provided an interesting perspective on the two authors profiled. Highly recommend.

Really indulgent first chapter about NBA drafts, which was interesting, but had little to do with the rest of the book. I was most interested in the story of Amos and Danny's relationship, and I almost think the book could have been entirely about that.

I've enjoyed books by Michael Lewis and plan to read others, but this one could not hold my attention.

Chapters 1, 8, and 9 were engaging but the remaining chapters seemed to drag on without making progress toward key concepts.

When it did touch on some of Kahneman and Tversky's ideas, it seemed forced. “Buying insurance is, strictly speaking, a stupid bet.” “Gamblers accept bets with negative expected values” (which is understood by many to be risky, not rational). “Back when a ducat was a ducat.”

I had high hopes for this book but I think I would have benefited from reading Kahneman and Tversky's works directly instead.

I did not expect that a book about the scientific breakthroughs and the partnership of two psychologists would make me cry. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are opposites in many ways, one extrovert and always the centre of the party, the other introvert and self-doubting. Their shared interests and respect for each other's intellect made them fall deep into a successful and intense partnership. Their collaborations over decades almost bordered on a love story (without the sex). They inspired each other, balanced out each other's strengths and weaknesses, and together set out to proof that people are far less rational as economists and common sense would like to believe. They jumpstarted the fields of behavioural economics and set the foundation for Big Data projects. Yet all love stories have highs and lows, and this unexpectedly ended up being a very touching story.

A great mix of biography and science and insights into our own less-than-rational minds.

One of the best books I read recently.

This book was very fascinating. It was interesting to read about such a cool collaboration between these two researchers. So many things Danny and Amos researched feel like such a no brainer now, even though there's still a lot of ways for their findings to disrupt industries these days.

So far Michael Lewis' books have really shined a light on very interesting subjects.

This will probably be my favorite read of the year. Kahneman and Tversky are two of my academic heroes, as they were/are to many behavioral economists and social scientists, so when I heard that Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Big Short fame was writing a dual-biopic about the pair, I was very excited. To be honest, parts of the book were a little slow and dry, but other parts made me tear up. I cannot imagine how someone who is unfamiliar with this field or their work would react to all of the psychology terminology and mathematical equations, but for me, this book was the origin story of all the topics I loved in grad school. I am looking forward to the movie (half-joking about this).

An accessible introduction to behavioural economics embedded in a mostly interesting story about its 2 fathers.

I can't believe my (systematically irrational) mind, but I finish this book with maximum choked-up-ness. Like, I was fighting tears on my commute in. Oh, Amos. Oh, Danny. Oh, choice architecture.

This could be put on the shelf next to Nina Munk's The Idealist (about Jeff Sachs), and Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains (about Paul Farmer): that is, a brilliantly written account (by a journalist) of a genius theory in economics/public health, and the genius-personalities behind it. In this case, we explore the foundation of behavioral economics, from the odd couple buddy movie that was the Kahneman & Tversky collaboration.

What Michael Lewis does brilliantly (as Nina Munk and Tracy Kidder also did for their subjects) is create a strong, coherent, emotional narrative: it's a biography of an incredible intellectual romance. The excitement of finding each other, the pain of their “divorce” late in the life, the tragedy of Amos's early death. Their odd couple-ness: Danny as the pessimistic, dark, sensitive one; Amos as the brilliant, funny, fiery one. It's a history of the foundation of Israel, of the end of WW2, and there are detours into the vast influence of their work: in Nate Silver-style sports analytics/moneyball, in government “nudge” units, in the movement for evidence-based medicine and acknowledging doctor fallibility.

And, of course, it's a crash course in my favorite part of grad school: subjective probability! Behavioral economics! We hear from a lot of great “2nd generation” voices: George Loewenstein, Richard Thaler, Cass Sunstein (Dan Ariely is notably absent, WHY?). It's all super inspiring and - unexpectedly - super touching. I loved hearing all the human details: Amos's incredible, eviscerating wit (the Amos-isms, omg); Danny's relatable insecurities; the hilarious cultural comparisons of economics departments versus psychology departments; that “hold your breath” moment when the Nobel Prize committee calls. Lewis also tries (and mostly succeeds) in weaving in each behavioral economics topic with how it was applying to the men themselves: when Danny starts working on “the undoing project” (exploring how people think about counterfactuals; i.e. “simulation heuristics”), it's at the same time as the relationship between him and Amos is starting to degrade. Gah, so sad!

Super recommended.

This book was a long time coming, and it was definitely worth the wait. The work of Kahneman and Tversky sits just under the surface of all my favorite Michael Lewis books. Moneyball in particular left me wondering about the systematic biases in human thought, and soon enough I ended up in front of a copy of “Thinking Fast and Slow.” I was floored by what I read. I had always considered psychology a “soft science,” incapable of making real predictions about reality. The catalog of biases that K&T described cut right through my disbelief as I fell for each of their cleverly constructed cognitive illusions. Michael Lewis puts the story of these scientists into a package that is informative and engrossing, I would highly recommend it to anyone