Each chapter from God Don't Make No Trash is made up of small stories. See The Undoing as a complete chapter below. See the intro or visit the stories page.

Book of secrets 📙

"Everything, in retrospect, is obvious." 

—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 in grad school.

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 harm.

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 with remarkable frequency. 

Michael Lewis penned two other bestselling books on the mind that went on to become major films: "The Big Short" and "Moneyball."

Both shed light on the fact that we're not dumb for being misled by our minds. Our minds make us human. We just can't always "see" when it happens.

The work of Tversky and Kehneman gave 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"

35,000 decisions ⚾

"Don't be afraid to challenge the status quo, even if it means going against popular opinion."  

—Oakland A's manager Billy Beane

> the undoing | ugly girlfriend

"The Undoing Project" became another bestselling book for journalist Michael Lewis when it was published in 2017.  

It was a major capstone to Lewis's career. Central to the story is the eternally fraught relationship between our intuitive, unconscious minds and our analytical, consciously aware minds. 

Psychology and behavioral science play starring roles in Michael Lewis's other books, too.

Arguably his best-known book is "Moneyball."

It tells the true story of how the Oakland A's major league baseball team hired a Yale economics graduate in a moment of desperation.  

They didn't have the money other teams did for recruiting players. 

Recruitment scouts for the A's often relied on their intuition and past experiences to make decisions and judgments. 

But that led to folly. In one mind-boggling example, A's recruiters judged the confidence of players based on whether they had "an ugly girlfriend." 

Other recruits were turned away for having an unusual throwing style or for being too old.

Why is it so dangerous for baseball recruiters to rely so much on their intuition?  

Because our intuition is infamously prone to error, as Lewis describes in "The Undoing Project." 

Experts say that most of our cognition occurs in the subconscious, intuitive mind. The average human being – including baseball recruiters – makes 35,000 decisions each day, mostly without "knowing" it. 

How many of those decisions do you remember making? 

• next time "The Oakland A's baseball team identified unconventional talent."
• listening The Replacements "Bastards of Young"

No one is cursed ⚾

"We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty."  

—Data scientist Nate Silver

> the undoing | cursed

After adopting a data-driven approach for evaluating recruits, the Oakland A's baseball team identified unconventional talent that was being overlooked elsewhere in the league. 

Their new strategy for analyzing players led the A's to rely less on the error-prone human intuition of recruiters. They eschewed multimillion-dollar superstars and assembled a team of undervalued players that could win on a budget.

To get there, the A's found a Yale economics graduate, Paul DePodesta, who could analyze and interpret granular performance data.

The team needed to do more than just rely on gut feelings, another name for our intuition or subconscious mind.

Using DePodesta's methods, the A's spotted hidden recruitment opportunities.

They assembled a team of players that often defied conventional wisdom within the A's and around the league.

The A's nonetheless proved the power of data and science by enjoying a long stretch of wins that surprised and impressed fans and analysts in 2002. 

The A's experience showed how cognitive biases and judgment errors could impair even the most experienced and knowledgeable sports recruiters. 

Incorporating more scientific understandings revealed how baseball teams for decades had relied on mental hunches, premonitions, illusions, and fallacies that led teams to believe they knew more than they really did, wrote journalist Michael Lewis in his book about the A's, "Moneyball."

This scientific revolution in professional baseball shed light on staggering inefficiencies all across professional sports. And everything else.

Lewis wondered how this lack of clarity about the natural operations of our minds applied elsewhere:

>> “If the market for baseball players was inefficient, what market couldn't be? If a fresh, analytical approach had led to the discovery of new knowledge in baseball, was there any sphere of human activity in which it might not do the same?”

This inspired other professional sports teams to embrace data and science in their recruitment methods. The A's showed that baseball's relentless pursuit of costly power players can hold teams back, not propel them to the World Series. 

Baseball fans for 70 years believed that the Chicago Cubs were cursed. Fans for 80 years believed the Boston Red Sox were cursed.

When these teams embraced science and baseball analytics like the A's, suddenly they weren't cursed anymore and each won the World Series.

• next time "The technical concept of rationality is nonsense."
• listening Chet Baker "My Funny Valentine"

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"

Running 🥵

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

—Voltaire

> the undoing | seductive

Among their many findings, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky investigated why our minds automatically rearranged our memories to make better sense of the world. 

This happens at the expense of truth and accuracy. 

According to biographer Michael Lewis, Amos Tversky once told a room full of historians that "the mind arranges historical facts in ways that make past events feel a lot less uncertain, and a lot more predictable, than they actually are."

Tversky and Kahneman once had ambitions of teaching kids "how to detect their own seductive but misleading intuition and correct for it."

Adults, they said, were too self-deceptive.

Our choices are often based on "delusional optimism" without us consciously understanding events in our lives that way.

The solution, said Kahneman and Tversky? 

Create small openings in our lives and give our conscious minds time to examine our thoughts and actions for reason and logic before making the next move. While it might take bits of time from our day, thinking smarter could save us time, too.

Besides, feeling like we're in a hurry all the time is just another psychological condition.

It’s known as "hurry sickness."

• next time Chapter end
• listening Self Defense Family "Rest in Peace for the Error Shall Not Be Repeated"

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