The Undoing Project

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Michael Lewis

What it’s about

This book takes through a captivating dual biography and intellectual history that chronicles the extraordinary partnership between Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Their groundbreaking collaboration in the 1970s and 1980s revolutionized psychology, added foundational insights to the field of behavioral economics, and fundamentally challenged the idea that humans are rational, which is implicit in most economic theories since the time of Adam Smith.

Why I like it

Lewis highlights how Kahneman and Tversky hated the way people were judged by their results rather than their thinking. This is a central theme in blue line management. The book also argues that humans are constantly creating "narratives" to explain why things happened because we are uncomfortable with the idea that the world is inherently probabilistic and messy. These narratives inadvertently undermine our ability to develop insights into the forces driving outcomes and it is this tendency to create narratives (aka belief systems) that Shithappensians do not tolerate in their efforts to interact with and learn from their world.