“Moneyball” follows Beane as he exploits these blind spots for profit. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind's view of its own mind.But the story’s appeal lay partly in the inference that trading ballplayers was symptomatic, that other fields were ripe for similar “disruption.” Since then, moneyball has come to connote the application of quantitative principles to any number of endeavors considered the preserve of old-school human acumen, Lewis notes in his latest work, “The Undoing Project,” rattling off a list - traditionally artisanal moviemaking and publishing among them - in which such efforts are reportedly under way.īut as arresting as Beane’s audacious tactics for on-field success were, more startling still was the dysfunction “Moneyball” disclosed in professional baseball - its fixation with physique that led teams to consistently overlook paunchy prospects with superior stats, preoccupation with performance yardsticks that turn out to be whimsical and thralldom to the wisdom of the gut (supposedly an organ of exquisite discernment, but frequently. This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. They flipped a coin to decide the lead authorship on the first paper they wrote, and simply alternated thereafter. They worked together so closely that they couldn't remember whose brain originated which ideas, or who should claim credit. Amos Tversky was a brilliant, self-confident warrior and extrovert, the center of rapt attention in any room Kahneman, a fugitive from the Nazis in his childhood, was an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas.

The Undoing Project is about a collaboration between two men who became heroes in the university and on the battlefield - both had important careers in the Israeli military - and whose research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis's own work possible. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process.

The undoing project lewis