Logical animals 🔱
"Baseball – of all things – was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails to respond, to the scientific method."
—Journalist Michael Lewis
> the undoing | moneyball
Star psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed in the 1970s how cognitive biases and judgment errors were firing away in our minds all the time without our conscious understanding of them.
- These errors and biases lead to bad judgments we can't comprehend and behaviors we regret. Worse, we let other people decide the meaning of bad and the meaning of regret.
Prominent thinkers since the Enlightenment period in the 17th and 18th centuries have assumed we were rational, logical creatures who made rational, informed choices.
>> Wrong. ❌
Daniel Kahneman said in a 2017 interview that the human mind couldn’t be fully rational because it was finite.
- "Being consistent in all your beliefs is impossible. … The technical concept of rationality is psychologically nonsense."
I read a biography of Tversky and Kahneman in graduate school called "The Undoing Project," because I loved the journalist Michael Lewis who wrote it.
Lewis is probably best known for his book "Moneyball" about professional sports teams over-relying on the messy and error-prone intuitions of recruiters. It went on to become a major film with Brad Pitt.
I mentioned "The Undoing Project" on the Slack channel of a Tulsa coffee shop where I worked:
>> "You'll never see the world the same way again. I thought I was a very smart person before I read it. It humbled me."
- next time "Our minds automatically rearrange our memories to make better sense of the world."
- listening Coco Jones "Fallin"
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