The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. One of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, Kahneman and Tversky's extraordinary friendship incited a revolution in Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis's own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize-winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.
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Community Reviews
*grunts*
Wow. A month and a half to listen to a 10 hour book...at 1.4 speed, which cuts it down to about 7.5 hours.
I think it's safe to say I am not the target audience for this book. I have no idea what the point was or what I'm supposed to take away from this.
I only even read it because a friend recommended it to me and I promised I'd finish it. Now I have and that's all I can say about this book.
Wow. A month and a half to listen to a 10 hour book...at 1.4 speed, which cuts it down to about 7.5 hours.
I think it's safe to say I am not the target audience for this book. I have no idea what the point was or what I'm supposed to take away from this.
I only even read it because a friend recommended it to me and I promised I'd finish it. Now I have and that's all I can say about this book.
I read a lot of behavioral economics, and I've read Kahneman and Thaler, but I was missing the context of the history of Kahneman and Tversky, followed later by Thaler, being the inventors of this discipline. I was also missing the context of the in-between location of the discipline between psychology and economics, but more importantly as the source of strife between psychologists and economists. This book also expressed my frustrations with my economics classes, and I'm even more annoyed now that I realize my economics professors were basically just ignoring research that was at that point already 20 years old. I was also interested in learning about how this research came out of Israel. I was maybe a little less interested in the ins-and-outs of Kahneman and Tversky's personal relationship and about which Lewis left me a bit confused.
Easily my least favorite Michael Lewis book. There were tidbits about the theories Kahneman and Tversky developed to explain human psychological behavior. This made the book marginally interesting.
However, the book mostly went on and on about the personal relationship between the two psychologists. I found it impossible to care a whole lot about either of them, or to be moved by their enthusiasm for the theories they were developing. It felt like a really bad romance story built around characters that you simply couldn't warm to or care about.
I previously read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" and was riveted by the experiments used to understand how the mind works. I strongly recommend that book for anyone interested in understanding human behavior. But the only thing "The Undoing Project" accomplishes is to make psychology research, and psychologists, seem more boring than they really is.
However, the book mostly went on and on about the personal relationship between the two psychologists. I found it impossible to care a whole lot about either of them, or to be moved by their enthusiasm for the theories they were developing. It felt like a really bad romance story built around characters that you simply couldn't warm to or care about.
I previously read Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" and was riveted by the experiments used to understand how the mind works. I strongly recommend that book for anyone interested in understanding human behavior. But the only thing "The Undoing Project" accomplishes is to make psychology research, and psychologists, seem more boring than they really is.
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