Another clever book from Michael Lewis, who is an excellent 'explainer'. As you're reading, everything about the topic makes perfect sense. Then you finish the last page, close the book and try to tell someone else all about it... only to realise you can't remember the finer details any more. It was the same for me and Flash Boys, which I also thoroughly enjoyed (just don't ask me to tell you about it).

Why read a book you might not be able to remember? Well, it's good at the time and you never know, your brain might work better than mine.

Onto the book. The Undoing Project is about the relationship between two psychologists who had an unlikely friendship, brought out the best in each other, and co-authored some hugely important papers on psychology and economics, largely on judgement and decision making and some other things that have since fallen out of my head.

Lewis begins by looking at the way the basketball draft is done each year. Now, you have to forgive me because I am from the UK and know zero about the basketball draft. But he explains how many draft picks used to be done by looking at a handful of stats (that turned out to be pretty much meaningless), an interview, and a lot of intuition. And it meant that a lot of the time the wrong people were picked. Why? The basketball analyst he's speaking to works out that it's because people look at the wrong stats, they trust their gut too much, they assume a player who looks like another one might play like another one, or can't see that a player who looks different might still be capable of performing well.

Eventually the analyst (and thus Lewis) is drawn to the work of Tversky and Kahneman from the 70s, exploring the way humans make judgements and decisions. He goes back further, running through their early lives and showing how they became the psychologists they turned into, how war and life in Israel and being thrown together turned them into an incredible joint brain that worked best when they were left alone together. Tversky and Kahneman were/are brilliant, but also very different. Over the years, this difference, which may have sparked their chemistry in the first place, eventually started to grow into resentment that led to the end of their best years together. Maybe that's why it's called The Undoing Project.

It's an interesting book on several levels. First, even the basketball stuff appealed to me - that millions of dollars are being thrown away due to intuition over stats.

Second, the relationship between the two psychologists is intriguing, being both fragile and strong.

Third, the psychology itself is fascinating. They explore how the human brain is often not rational (I'm probably saying this all wrong from a psychology point of view, but hey I'm the laywoman, I can do what I like), that people feel (and weigh) losses more than gains, that even statisticians can get confused about probability if a scenario is described in a certain way, that we will plump for answers that match an idea we have in our heads rather than what's actually more likely.

I was surprised by the surge of emotions I had at the end of the book. I was completely new to the subjects and so their fates affected me quite strongly. I didn't realise how much I was 'in' to the book until that point.

Will definitely read Lewis again.

The story this book tells is quite extraordinary – a look at huge changes and developments at the point where psychology and economics intersect, and also a story of academic life and of a unique friendship. Many people first came across Daniel Kahneman when his book Thinking Fast and Slow hit the bestseller lists a few years ago: his theories of how we make decisions and judge probabilities, and how and why we nearly always get it wrong, made for fascinating reading.


The Undoing Project tells  how Kahneman worked with Amos Tversky on these theories.


 
Tversky and Kahneman in 1974


Michael Lewis has an unequalled ability to tell a true story - it doesn’t seem to matter what the subject matter is, he can make sense of it and spell it out so anyone can understand with a little effort. He writes non-fiction, and three of his books have been turned into films. All were Oscar-nominated, and two won Oscars (including Sandra Bullock's for The Blind Side). He is a very clever man and a very good writer.

His past topics have included Wall St, Silicon Valley, American football, baseball statistics, and the economic crash. The statistics book was Moneyball – a phrase that has now entered the language for a form of gaming the system by NOT trusting experts and intuition.

And it was via that book – and a gently critical review - that Lewis came upon the work of Tversky and Kahneman and decided to write about them. The Undoing Project explains all that, but also starts with a very long section about college basketball – I had to trust him that he was going somewhere, but he did manage to make even this subject interesting(ish). After that the book becomes close to unputdownable, and I cannot think of any other author who could have written so well both about the academic content, and about the unusual friendship between the two men. So The Undoing Project is highly recommended – it is educational, exciting, and touching, and you will feel a better and cleverer person for having read it.

And now I am going to write about a completely different aspect of the author.

I have mentioned before how I am not very good at knowing famous people (Carla Lane, here) and Michael Lewis, the celebrated and highly successful best-selling author, is another example.

More than 15 years ago (when he was already a bestseller for Liars’ Poker) he wrote regularly for Slate magazine in the USA, where I also worked. He wrote a hilarious series of reports on the Microsoft trial, and then I think lost interest. The readers of Slate (which was at that time owned by Microsoft) were all convinced that he had been stopped from writing the pieces, because Bill Gates/Microsoft didn’t like them. This wasn’t true at all (and would have been fairly unimaginable to anyone who knew Slate and MS and their general climates at the time) but it was simply stated and accepted as fact: the readers weren’t having it. It was a minor point, but I found it quite interesting. If you couldn’t tell the truth on a statement of fact, and be believed, well, what did the future hold?


Michael Lewis


Lewis then wrote a series of dispatches from Paris, where he had gone to live with his family. They were amusing entertaining pieces (since collected in a book called Home Game) – he wrote about his family in a way that would be very familiar now, but was much less common then.

And this is where I came in. Part of my job at Slate was to look at the way the readers responded to the writers. This wasn’t a big deal, no-one thought this was very important, but I found it endlessly interesting. Online commenting was, relatively, a very new thing, and I wrote about it for Slate every week. I also chose particularly good comments to feature in the magazine, and I wrote about responses to individual articles at the end of those articles. Most people at Slate didn’t take reader comments seriously at all – they didn’t see it as a force for good or bad, or a source of information, or useful audience research.

And Michael Lewis’s articles posed a problem. I don’t believe he ever looked at the online comments himself, though perhaps looked at my filtered version.

His (fairly) regular column attracted a group of regular readers and commentators, who formed a circle and held pretty much a week-long conversation: it would become much more active just after Lewis’ piece was posted, but carried on all the time. And the discussion was fascinating and hilarious – they would use his words as a starting point and then move on to all kinds of related areas.

But the commentators would make quite personal remarks about Lewis, his wife and his family. It is hard to remember now, but actually this was a new and very strange thing. When his wife gave birth to a baby his piece talked about them all. And some of his regular commenters started being rude about his children’s names. They said they were awful names, and these children would grow up as idiots, that they would be teased, and that Lewis and his wife (whose own name was criticized: ‘what do you expect with a name like that?’) were seriously to blame for giving them such ridiculous names.

Now, as I said, I don’t think Lewis knew or cared – he probably had other things on his mind with a new baby in the house – but I was bothered, and I thought for a long time as to whether these were acceptable comments to make. Criticism of the writer was fair game on the whole – but little children who had done nothing but have a writer for a father?

Given the way the world, and particularly the online world, has developed since then, this probably sounds like ridiculous overthinking. But it was a serious matter. In the end free speech won out, but I didn’t highlight or draw any attention to the posts. But it was a sign of things to come.

On another occasion Michael Lewis and his family made a trip to Rome, and he wrote a funny piece about his problems with a rented apartment then. Next thing I know, the landlord of the vacation rental is coming into the online comments to take issue with the Lewis version, and to defend himself and offer a different point of view. He was quite cross and temperamental, and made multiple posts. I had some email contact with the landlord to try to calm him down.

These two incidents were my epiphany: when I realized just how strange and new and different online commenting was, and that it wasn’t going to go away, or ever be controlled. I spent some time trying to make this point to others, but I wasn’t very persuasive and no-one could quite see it.

Some time over the next few years, everyone realized it, each person had their own epiphany,and would quite often then explain it to me…

I’ve read quite a few books on popular psychology and behavioural economics so I expected to skim a bit but I was gripped by The Undoing Project from start to finish.

It tells the story of the collaboration between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two gifted academic psychologists who have changed the way we think about rationality and decision making. It combines the biographies of the two men, a discussion of their key ideas and vignettes of other people who have been influenced by them or applied their thinking to fields ranging from sport and medicine.

Lewis contrasts their backgrounds. Kahneman grew up in constant danger in Nazi-occupied France, while Tversky was born into a pioneering and politically active family in British Palestine (later Israel). He describes their fierce intellects and contrasting temperaments – the reserved, anxious Kahneman and the charismatic, risk-taking Tversky.

The book gives you a strong sense of Israel during the early years of the state and their commitment to the country. When the Yom Kippur war breaks out and the two men are in California, they immediately head home to return to the army and active duty.

Lewis explains their ideas in a comprehensive and clear way. Their most famous work, for which Kahneman went on to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, was their debunking of the rational actor (or ‘man’) at the heart of classical economics. We all rely on heuristics (rules of thumb or gut responses) and most of the time that works well enough. But Kahneman and Tversky identified situations where these stop us making rational decisions, particularly those involving complex or statistical information. They demonstrated their ideas by using pleasingly everyday case studies, and found that even statisticians were fooled by them.

The Undoing Project is intriguing on the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky. It gives you insights into their friendship but there is a sense that their closeness was a mystery to even their closest friends and this for me is what drives the story.

Kahneman and Tversky agreed to be interviewed by Miles Shore, a psychiatrist who was studying the working methods of ‘fertile pairs’. He found that successful professional pairings are almost like happy romantic couples. They finish each other’s sentences, their intimacy leads them to exclude others, and crucially, there is a sense that their work is the result of their combined effort. They are unable to attribute the different elements to one member of the pair, their ideas arise organically from their collaboration.

Sadly, like a romantic couple, their relationship had periods of jealousy and professional rivalry and as the title suggests, estrangement.

Michael Lewis combines a serious treatment of their work with a moving human story. I actually felt bereft when I finished this book.