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\n(Amazon)<\/p>\n
\n(Amazon)<\/p>\n
Michael Lewis\u2019s brilliant book celebrates Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Israeli-American psychologists who are our age\u2019s apostles of doubt about human reason. The timing is fortunate, given that overconfident experts may have caused and then failed to predict such momentous events as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kahneman and Tversky (who died in 1996) first started working together in 1969. They were well-matched. The Holocaust survivor Mr. Kahneman chronically doubted even himself. The brash Tversky targeted his doubts toward others, especially (as one acquaintance noted) \u201cpeople who don\u2019t know the difference between knowing and not knowing.\u201d\u009d Testing people with quizzes in their laboratory, they found a host of \u201ccognitive biases\u201d\u009d afflicting rational thinking.<\/p>\n
One bias they found is that we underestimate uncertainty. In hindsight bias, for example, test subjects misremembered their own predictions as being correct. As Tversky explained, \u201cwe find ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet, after the fact we explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. . . . It leads us to believe that there is a less uncertain world than there actually is.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n