But the approach proves effective and, with some tweaks, remains in use today. They’re aghast what they considered a skilled task, demanding sophisticated powers of character judgment, had been reduced to a clerical exercise. Instead, recruiters are asked to rank them discretely 1 to 5 on individual behaviors. As well as indulging recruits’ inclination to present an idealized self, traditional interviews are susceptible to a “halo effect” in which an impression of certain qualities in interviewees is conflated with other attributes. He formulates a short questionnaire for recruiters to administer.Īs important as what it is - an attempt to identify behaviors corresponding to traits deemed militarily desirable - is what it isn’t: an invitation to discursive dialogue.

Conscripted into the military after graduating from Hebrew University, Kahneman is tasked with improving its ability to sort raw recruits into the different armed forces. Permitting its intellectuals the contemplative life of the mind is a luxury that Israel in its infancy cannot afford there’s a nation to build. Still, he’s indelibly marked by time and place. “A spectacularly original connoisseur of human error” possessed of a “fantastic, practical usefulness,” Danny Kahneman is a rich subject, but he’s hardly a solicitous protagonist for a storyteller, being mistrustful of memory and setting little store by the formative influence of a childhood spent in flight from the Nazis in Vichy France before arriving in Palestine among the first wave of postwar Jewish refugees. “The Undoing Project” picks up the dangling thread of the spectacle of human folly it revealed, documenting the mind meld between two Israeli psychologists that put the landscape of human error on the map, revolutionizing understanding of how in an uncertain world, our reach exceeds our grasp. “Moneyball” follows Beane as he exploits these blind spots for profit. But the story’s appeal lay partly in the inference that trading ballplayers was symptomatic, that other fields were ripe for similar “disruption.” Since then, moneyball has come to connote the application of quantitative principles to any number of endeavors considered the preserve of old-school human acumen, Lewis notes in his latest work, “The Undoing Project,” rattling off a list - traditionally artisanal moviemaking and publishing among them - in which such efforts are reportedly under way.īut as arresting as Beane’s audacious tactics for on-field success were, more startling still was the dysfunction “Moneyball” disclosed in professional baseball - its fixation with physique that led teams to consistently overlook paunchy prospects with superior stats, preoccupation with performance yardsticks that turn out to be whimsical and thralldom to the wisdom of the gut (supposedly an organ of exquisite discernment, but frequently.

The undoing project lewis