The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

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

—Voltaire

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

It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place

the happiness involved in receiving a desirable object is smaller than the unhappiness involved in losing the same object

Even the fairest coin, however, given the limitations of its memory and moral sense, cannot be as fair as the gambler expects it to be

psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those.

Michigan required that all PhD students in psychology pass a proficiency test in two foreign languages. Weirdly, the university didn’t count Hebrew as a foreign language but accepted mathematics. Though entirely self-taught in mathematics, Amos chose math as one of his languages and passed the test. For his second language he picked French. The test was to translate three pages from a book in the language: The student chose the book, and the tester chose the pages to translate. Amos went to the library and dug out a French math textbook with nothing but equations in it. “It might have had the word donc in it,” said Amos’s roommate Mel Guyer. The University of Michigan declared Amos Tversky proficient in French.

Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”

The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are.