Reading this after finishing Thinking Fast and Slow really threw the two writing styles into sharp relief. Lewis’ prose is flowing, readable and journalistic. There are plenty of evocative character details and lots of thought-provoking, illustrative analogies. Kahneman’s prose is tortured by comparison. His style is dry and academic and the more anecdotal passages read like they have been written by someone who has been told to be ‘witty’, ‘conversational’ or ‘informal’ but really has no idea how this might be done. There is no doubt that Kahneman’s book contains much more information; each chapter is essentially a detailed summary of an academic paper in Thinking Fast and Slow. But the density is overwhelming and, in the absence of a clear structure, soon creates confusion. In fairness to Kahneman, he does try to group the chapters into five sections: 1) Two Systems 2) Heuristics and Biases 3) Overconfidence 4) Choices 5) Two Selves. Despite this, there is so much information in each section, and it is presented in such a detailed way, I rarely felt like I was mastering the key points. Lewis, on the other hand, drastically reduces the amount of material he’s trying to present in The Undoing Project but still manages to convey a lot of the same information that Kahneman does because he is so much better at selecting and presenting the material. There is a real sense in which Lewis has simply taken the five or ten most striking ideas in Thinking Fast and Slow and mixed them with some of his excellent character sketches and career histories of the key actors behind the ideas. This is exactly the same formula as The Big Short; simply swapping complex decision theory for complex financial derivatives and psychologists for hedge fund managers. The result feels journalistic insofar as it is a collection of shorter essays, profiles and sketches stitched together. With Lewis it’s easy to look back over what you’ve read and identify the key themes: representativeness, availability, how people feel commission is worse than omission when dealing with regret and how people are risk seeking when dealing with losses and risk averse when dealing with gains. With Kahneman, the same information is presented in far richer detail but the overall sense of clarity is lost amongst the deluge of papers reviewed, the subtlety of the distinctions he is drawing and his questionable writing style. Kahneman’s book contains all the nuance and, ultimately, is a more informative book but Lewis’ presents the more comprehensible narrative; something that Kahneman would admit is very important given the way our mind works! Lewis is superficial and no one could accuse Kahneman of being that, but he is also readable and no one could accuse Kahneman of that either!
The life stories of both Kahneman and Tversky are interesting. With Kahneman as a fretful, nervous lonely, immigrant geek and Tversky as a swashbuckling, popular, native war hero; they make an odd couple. Perhaps Lewis’ book is too kind to Kahneman, who I presume spoke with Lewis far more than Tversky who was probably dead before Lewis even started this project. At one point I had the impression that Kahneman had all the ideas and Tversky simply helped him to have more confidence in them and make their papers a bit more readable! The academic community seem to have taken the opposite view, ascribing the majority of the credit to Tversky, which I think shows how this book ‘takes Kahneman’s side’ vs. the contemporary history. It was Tversky’s unwillingness to correct this presumption that he was the senior partner in the relationship that seems to have been the root of Kahneman’s displeasure with him. However, according to Lewis, it seems theirs’ was a true collaboration with neither able to compare individually with their abilities as a duo. As such, it is especially sad when the two fall out and drift apart. Given that both men seem to be fantastically difficult individuals it can hardly be seen as surprising. As ever, Michael Lewis draws intriguing biographical outlines of the two characters. Kahneman lived in a chicken coop for a while in occupied France as his family hid from the Nazis and their French sympathisers while Tversky once disobeyed orders to rescue an Israeli army colleague who had fainted beside a landmine he was trying to clear, saving his life. As usual, Lewis’ sketches are vivid but not comprehensive or particularly reflective. It reads like a newspaper or magazine profile or essay. As with his treatment of their academic work, he does a great job of selecting interesting vignettes and presenting them in a form that’s easy to consume. But both lack true depth, which is what makes the book such an easy read and probably makes Lewis so popular. Like almost everyone else, I’m more disposed to ‘A very short introduction to…’ type titles than completing the hard slog of long reading lists to really get to know a subject. To some extent, the more superficial and simplified it is, the easier it is to read and therefore the more enjoyable provided there is a decent narrative to keep you interested. Lewis creates most of this narrative out of the relationship between the two with the progression of their ideas playing an impressive supporting role. He’s good at judging the correct level of detail and spinning these quite scant details into a compelling narrative. But in the same way that I couldn’t hope to get the same level of understanding of the ideas contained in Thinking Fast and Slow from this book, it’s probably foolish to think I really know much about either psychologist’s life or character from the brief caricatures here. Looked at in another way, Lewis is a master of giving you enough information to support the main points he wants to make and doesn’t make the mistake of reducing the clarity of the whole book in an attempt to be exhaustive. Lewis is an author who appeals to your System 1 brain, as Kahneman would say! He tells you a cogent, vivid story that is easy to comprehend and satisfies you with its coherence! Lewis’ method has the drawback of being a bit journalistic. The information he selects is, necessarily, brief and sometimes I had the feeling that the protagonists’ lives, careers and characters were being simplified to make them more readily comprehensible or appealing; which, of course, they were!
It was a bit repetitive reading the same ideas that I had just read in Thinking Fast and Slow but, frankly, Lewis expounds them so much more briefly in prose that is so much easier to read I skipped through most of the repetition without inconvenience. There was only one section where I thought the writing was confused. In chapter 5, around p157, Lewis tells us that people are quick to jump to conclusions from a small amount of data; making assumptions about a general population on the basis of evidence from a sample size that is too small. As an example, he uses IQ and a sample group of students. If people are told the average IQ for all students is 100 and are then told that one student in the group sampled has an IQ of 150. Apparently they are, when asked, still likely to believe that the average IQ of the sample is 100 and that the person with the IQ of 150 is an outlier. This is as may be, but it definitely does not illustrate the point that Lewis is trying to make. In fact, it makes quite the opposite point. If people were too quick to draw general conclusions from small samples then they should believe that the average IQ of the sample is higher than 100 based on the person with an IQ of 150. This example Lewis gives shows that people are RELUCTANT to adjust their general assumptions based on a small sample not vice versa.
Kahneman’s character and work are subject to a good deal of hagiography in this book and you could argue that this is deserved given how influential his work has been. There were several aspects that stuck with me. Kahneman was a prolific idea generator and seemed to have far less trouble than most deciding to change his mind. He said, “I’ve always felt ideas were a dime a dozen. If you had one that didn’t work out, you should not fight too hard to save it, just go find another.” This strikes me as sound advice for investment too! The best example of this trait is probably when Kahneman abandons his theory of regret causing people to be risk averse when they actually showed themselves to be risk seeking when dealing with losses. Although he was losing a lot of work, by not obsessing over this he went on to discover something even more significant. Indeed, he showed admirable psychological fortitude in overcoming the sunk cost fallacy! Kahneman was also non-combative, unlike Tversky, and was, apparently, fond of giving the following example to students: Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced and in the other it is increased. It’s a key idea, making it easy to change”. Kahneman appears to have questioned himself, looked for faults in his behaviour and changed his mind a lot more than the average person. He also thought that singing things made them easier to remember, which is probably true!
At one stage I was tempted to say you could read this book and not bother with Thinking Fast and Slow but the two are of a totally different scope. TF&S takes you through all the nuance and nitty gritty. TUP is a brief precis of TF&S’s main ideas, with a history of the relationship between Kahneman and Tversky appended. This appropriately involves a history of each individual. However, Lewis includes a few other biographies that have a far more minor role in events. Probably most notable is the chapter on the general manager of the Houston Rockets, ostensibly included as this was the way Lewis himself found out about Kahneman and his work! Overall, this was a good, interesting book that summarised some of the ideas of TF&S and placed them within a brief context of the author’s lives and careers. It’s weak points were its slightly haphazard side plots and its formulaic, journalistic structure. The prose was flowing without ever being exceptionally beautiful but it was extremely readable. I think I would have preferred it if Lewis had been forced to write a more detailed summary of TF&S and then two focussed biographies of Kahneman and Tversky. Lewis has a gift for explaining complex ideas comprehensively and concisely. He also has a gift for profiles or personality sketches. However, in this book he wanders too far from the central topic in ways which are fairly enjoyable but also pretty irrelevant and I felt the main subject deserved tighter attention. Lewis focuses a lot on the magical relationship between the two psychologists even though it will be forever impossible to recreate a dynamic that only two people, one dead, ever experienced. I felt like a tighter focus on the pair’s biographies might have yielded more interesting insights. The book could have had a better, narrower structure in my opinion but it’s a minor complaint as, on the whole, I thought it was a good book.
No comments:
Post a Comment