michael lewis new book the undoing project

It was just like one of those things where a stock is going up and people impose a false sense of order on it. He got almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton! He happened to get more in some of the right places. But that's not what it was at all! It was a kind of accident. The tone of the commentary is already like, 'If you had been out there and you'd taken the pulse of the ordinary American, you'd have seen it coming,' as if it were a failure of intelligence. You'll be amazed by how many people will have 'predicted' this thing a year from now, who didn't see it the day before Election Day.

And you see this in spades in our country right now. The last thing I'll say is that Danny and Amos pointed out that when something happens people didn't predict, they find ways to explain it as if it were predictable. So the first thing they could undo was the FBI director stirring up trouble about Hillary's emails, when really there are all kinds of things that could have happened that would have changed the election. They started with the outcome and worked their way back to find the first thing they could undo to change the outcome. You imagine, 'If only they hadn't been on that train when it went off the rails - if only.' After the election, some people tried to undo Trump. Lewis: Danny and Amos studied the rules of the human imagination when it tries to undo something, tries to create an alternative reality. 'There are millions of illegal voters.' Everything's 'huge.' I don't think he's doing it consciously, but he does very well in kind of inserting himself into those kind of chinks in our mental armor.įeloni: What about looking at the way that those who opposed Trump are struggling to accept it? Trump's anchoring people every which way. Amos and Danny showed that you could anchor the mind into answering a question a certain way by giving them a totally unrelated piece of information dropped before. And people who had spun a high number would guess a higher percentage than people who had spun a low number.

And then, after subjects get a number, they ask them what they think the percentage of countries in the United Nations come from Africa. Amos and Danny did these studies where they'd give their lab subjects a wheel of fortune with the numbers one to 100 on it and have them spin the wheel. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

Michael lewis new book the undoing project