The human brain has evolved perfectly for wrongness. When presented with a new situation or new data, we make assumptions based on similar things we’ve encountered in the past. Once we make those assumptions, we find it difficult to change our minds. We are herd-like creatures: If the people around us believe something, we’re more likely to believe it too. If someone or something does manage to convince us a belief is wrong, in retrospect, we usually won’t remember it that way. We’ll recall being more correct originally than was actually the case.
These are some of the tools we’ve picked up over the millennia to make sense of reality, to cope with a chaotic universe in which everything from asteroids to poisonous berries is trying to kill us. For the purposes of being smart enough to advance the species another generation, they’re great tools. There’s a reason we’re overwhelming the planet. But when it comes to solving some of humanity’s more complex problems, well, it’s safe to there are sharper ones buried elsewhere in the shed.
That’s the general gist of “The Undoing Project,” the latest book by Michael Lewis, which chronicles the decades-long working relationship between Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two men you’ve probably never heard of who made an outsized impact on how we interpret the world. The title refers to a consistent thread throughout Tversky and Kahneman’s research: The desire to highlight the many ways in which the consensus is wrong, to figure out why, and to try to come up with a better option—even if that better option is simply acknowledging our ignorance.
As Lewis writes at one point: “There [a]re a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer [i]s, ‘It’s impossible to know for sure.’”
A couple other recent books are also concerned with just such questions: “But What If We’re Wrong?” by Chuck Klosterman and “The Perfect Pass” by S.C. Gwynne. The three works take very different approaches to skepticism and heterodoxy, but taken together they offer an illuminating look at the ways we think about thinking and some of the similarities between pioneers who upend established wisdom.
“But What If We’re Wrong” is subtitled “Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past,” which offers a pretty clear summation of Klosterman’s mission in the text. His primary thesis is that many things we currently think are obviously correct will, in the future, appear idiotic. He spends most of the book giving examples and conducting extended thought experiments about the potential ways widespread opinion might change. Which bands will be remembered? Is democracy the best form of government? How much of our current model of the universe is actually correct?
Whereas “The Undoing Project” focuses on the psychological underpinnings of incorrectness, Klosterman is more interested in how new information might change our opinions. For him, it’s not so much about the mental heuristics we use; it’s that there’s a lot of relevant stuff out there we don’t know.
Take “The Matrix.” Upon its release in 1999, the movie was a smash hit due largely to its cinematic techniques (think bullet time) and the philosophical idea that humanity lives in a simulation. Characters in the film choose to swallow a blue pill that leaves them blissfully ignorant or a red pill that allows them to confront the true reality—an idea that weird pick-up artists and other embarrassing white dudes co-opted into a metaphor about how all women and minorities hate them, or something like that.
But Klosterman argues that in the future, new information will completely change the way people think about “The Matrix.” The movie was written and directed by the Wachowski siblings—who in 1999 were brothers named Larry and Andy and who now, in 2017, are sisters named Lana and Lilly. In retrospect, Klosterman thinks critics will see “The Matrix” not as a film about living in a simulation, but as one about the struggles and impossibilities of being transgender in the late part of the twentieth century. New data leads to a new interpretation.
“But What If We’re Wrong?” is a generalist’s look at accepted wisdom. “The Perfect Pass” is a case study of one specific question: What’s the best way to play football? For the first hundred and fifty years of the sport, a great many different coaches came up with a great many options.
Then, a quarter-century ago, Hal Mumme and Mike Leach arrived at an answer all their own.
Football fans probably know the story of the Air Raid, a pass-heavy offense that emphasizes simplicity and individual creativity over the sport’s usual military complexity. Mumme and his offensive coordinator, Leach, spent a decade-plus developing their system in high schools and small universities before unleashing its transformative effects on big-time college football around the turn of the twenty-first century.
But it’s a story usually told by sportswriters. Part of the what made “The Perfect Pass” so enjoyable was having an author like Gwynne—whose other books include a biography of Stonewall Jackson and a history of the Comanche people—slumming it in the toy department. The effect is a broadening of the lens, turning a football story into something much more relevant to the world at large.
One revelation is Mumme and Leach’s similarity to Tversky and Kahneman. Partnership was a key factor in both pairs’ innovations; for Tversky and Kahneman in particular, conversation with each other was an accelerant for their iconoclasm. Both sets of innovators had self-doubt: If this is right, how come nobody’s ever thought of it before? The presence of another person who believed the same things helped confirm their own sanity.
Another similarity was that, for both, progress was piecemeal. The Air Raid was not born fully formed from Mumme’s mind; it progressed over the years, gradually incorporating various principles until a philosophy coalesced. It was the same for the psychologists. Their revolution came not with any one single experiment or paper, but over the course of decades as their work highlighted one area after another in which human brains consistently make the same sorts of mistakes.
The introduction of “The Undoing Project” is one of the best parts of the whole book, by which I don’t mean to damn with faint praise. It’s a really interesting introduction. Lewis gives the story for how the book came about—how it’s in some ways a sequel to “Moneyball,” his classic report on how the Oakland Athletics of the early 2000s used unconventional thinking to outsmart the rest of Major League Baseball. Lewis realized that “Moneyball” was simply one chapter of a much larger story, one about humanity’s continued irrationality in high-stakes situations that was the subject of Tversky and Kahneman’s research.
We operate every day as if our decision-making is based on logic and rationality and fact, but the entirety of human history tells us that’s not the case. The earth was the center of the universe until it wasn’t anymore. Newton’s theory of gravity was correct until Einstein came along. It’s impossible to walk on the moon until Neil Armstrong does it. The best way to play football involves a fullback. The list is literally endless. What if we’re wrong? It’s a lot more than just a thought experiment, because we almost certainly are.