The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

“Last impressions can be lasting impressions.”

Their memory of pain was different from their experience of it. They remembered moments of maximum pain, and they remembered, especially, how they felt the moment the pain ended. But they didn’t particularly remember the length of the painful experience.

People had a miserable time for most of their vacation and then returned home and remembered it fondly; people enjoyed a wonderful romance but, because it ended badly, looked back on it mainly with bitterness.

All too often, we find ourselves unable to predict what will happen; yet after the fact we explain what did happen with a great deal of confidence. This “ability” to explain that which we cannot predict, even in the absence of any additional information, represents an important, though subtle, flaw in our reasoning.

“most advances in science come not from eureka moments but from ‘hmmm, that’s funny.’”

Error wasn’t merely instructive; it was the key that might unlock the deep nature of the mechanism. “How do you understand memory?” he asked. “You don’t study memory. You study forgetting.”

“Because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean,” Danny later wrote, “it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”

That’s how Amos would begin: by undoing the mistakes of others. As it turned out, other people had made some other mistakes.

By changing the context in which two things are compared, you submerge certain features and force others to the surface.