This holiday season, I received The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed our Minds as a gift from a friend. As soon as I received it, I started it eagerly.

I’ve read several books by Michael Lewis and enjoyed each one thoroughly.  While this one is not as gripping as the others, there is real value.  The big “aha” moment is supposed to be about how decision analytics got started as a field.  For me, the biggest lesson was what it felt like to be an Israeli at the nation’s beginning as well as through later decades as Israel has been under various attacks from their geographic neighbors.

I will use this new layer of understanding as I read through current news reports about the Middle East.

 
It is also a touching story about a complex friendship between two men, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  It takes a while to wind up but the nuances it presents are of the kind that only fiction offers and the ambiguity that dominates their relationship reminds me of my own twin sisters.  They fight between themselves but woe to any outsider who would challenge one or the other.  At the same time, they are literally, or as near to literally as can be, of “one mind.”  Their collaboration gave birth to the theory of regret, anchoring, the desire to avoid loss, the recency effect, the memory of pain, framing and loss aversion among other key concepts in psychology and behavioral economics today.  They were looking for general properties of what it means to be human and to make choices — economic, political and otherwise — in an uncertain world.

I hope that anyone close to the “nuclear buttons” today gives heed to their work. I am amazed that anyone ever thought that humans in their natural or usual state are rational. Only on occasion are we rational and that’s what Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky set out to prove.

Big data and behavioral economics aside, love is not rational.  The book does not mention love, yet who we choose to love may be more important from a decision perspective than anything else in our lives.   It was certainly important in the lives of Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman.

Have you read this work yet? If so, let me know what you think!