The BookBar Book Club is open to all, and hosted by a different person every month. February will see regular customer Paul Caouette in the lounge instead of his usual spot at the bar facilitating discussion on ‘The Undoing Project’.
Everyone believes that, with a little effort, he or she can separate truth from falsehood. That given the right amount of information, one also can make a rational and unbiased decision. In “The Undoing Project,” best selling author Michael Lewis (Money Ball, The Big Short) has written a chronicle that is both a love story and an exploration into the minds of two intellectual giants whose intense collaboration led to a totally new branch of science called “behavioral economics.” These two radically different individuals, in an uncommon friendship that last over twenty years, gleefully dismantled long held notions about reason and intuition. It is not an exaggeration to say that their work has changed the way all scientists see their world and it is guaranteed to challenge your worldview as well.
Consider the picture below. If I were to tell you the horizontal lines connecting the two arrows are the same length you might recommend I visit my optometrist, or even my therapist. There’s no doubt that the top line is shorter than the bottom one. But they are equal! And even after measuring and confirming their equality we still “see” them as different.
Daniel Kahnehan and Amos Twerski saw more than quirk in this confusion. Driven by Kahnehan’s self doubt about his own judgements and supported by Twerski’s rigorous pursuit of truth, these two men were able to challenge psychologists, medical professionals, and even economists on how they attended to facts and the decisions made based on those “facts”. It’s been forty years since their first paper, ‘Subjective Probability,: A Judgment of Representativeness’ and there is no branch of science where their seminal work hasn’t had an impact. The creative energy that bound a shy, doubtful introvert to an assertive self-assured extrovert ultimately resulted in a Nobel Prize.
Pick it up today and join us Friday, February 8, at 7:00 PM at BookBar. Let’s explore together how their work can help us in our everyday encounter with the “real” world.
bookbarblog 