From Dynamic Ecology
by Meghan Duffy, a University of Michigan ecologist and associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
I recently finished Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project, which focuses on the lives and work of psychologists Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky. They changed how we think about how we think, with their work on psychology having major influences in economics and medicine, in particular. I really enjoyed the book, and there were a few points I wanted to write about here, as I think they are important for scientists, mentors, and/or academics to consider. It’s not a full review of the book* – I’m just focusing in on a few areas that I thought were particularly notable.
Variation in and between samples & how we interpret it
One major theme of Amos and Danny’s work is that humans are not nearly as rational as we think we are. (I’m referring to them by their first names because this is what Lewis does throughout the book.) This includes studies that they did on academic statisticians, who routinely made basic errors when asked about different scenarios. One important one is that
“even statisticians tended to leap to conclusions from inconclusively small amounts of evidence. They did this, Amos and Danny argued, because they believed – even if they did not acknowledge the belief – that any given sample of a large population was more representative of that population than it actually was.” – page 159