Book of secrets 📙
"Everything, in retrospect, is obvious."
—Journalist Michael Lewis, "The Undoing Project"
> the undoing | betrayed
Journalist Michael Lewis's 2017 book "The Undoing Project" was a firebomb on everything I thought I knew about perception and the media.
I was a graduate student in Austin at the University of Texas.
- The book wasn't required reading. But "The Undoing Project" became arguably the most important thing I read during that time.
It describes how people are not fundamentally rational when they make decisions and choices as economists had long believed.
- This revelation, made by legendary psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky during the 1970s, has since swept across seemingly every professional and academic discipline in America and beyond. 💡⚡
Human beings can't consciously "see" the innumerable ways in which irrational mental processes betray us, Lewis writes. Cognitive errors and biases and lapses in judgment can't be easily detected and disrupted.
And they can "unknowingly" lead to profound harms.
But they also help keep us alive by enabling us to make decisions quickly with mental shortcuts.
Lewis adds:
- "The brain is limited. There are gaps in our attention. The mind contrives to make those gaps invisible to us. We think we know things we don't. We think we are safe when we are not."
Many of our perplexing behaviors are programmed by our maker and we don't understand why.
We experience naturally occurring biases and errors every minute of every day.
We're not dumb for being misled by our minds. Our minds make us human.
The work of Tversky and Kehneman helped give us permission to make decisions with less guilt and shame.
But the achievements of the two men still aren't known by most people.
Said Tversky before his death in 1996:
>> "It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."
- next time "The average human being makes 35,000 decisions each day."
- listening The Jesus Lizard "Zachariah"
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