The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
by Michael Lewis at first focuses on one man's attempt to apply the Moneyball process to drafting for the Houston Rockets Basketball Team. It is marginally successful but imprecise. While trying to take human biases out of the process used to evaluate player the manager discovers that this process has already been studied by a pair of Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow was a summary of their research.Kahneman's early family life was spent on the run and in hiding during the second world war in occupied France. After the war ended and his father died they moved to Israel. He worked with the Israeli military to help select proper roles for soldiers. Prior to this selection process during the early stages of the state, the Israeli military was not competent. Atrocities were committed on both sides of the conflict of the war and Tversky was in the thick of the fighting. He was struck by the rapid transition from killing machine to a person who could be compassionate towards defeated enemy soldiers.
The gregarious Tversky and the brilliant but insecure Kahneman formed an unlikely intellectual partnership attempting to determine errors in the thinking process of human beings. His bold style contrasted with Kahneman's as he was an enthusiastic paratrooper. They worked together developing questions (paraphrasing Tversky)not to develop artificial intelligence but study natural ignorance. This marriage of two intellects resulted in the psychologist, Kahneman recieving the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for prospect theory.
The Undoing Project - 9 minutes
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