Book review_The Undoing Project （書評：不作計畫）

Michael Lewis did it again! Through my whole adulthood, his books have been a source of references for me to understand this irrational world. The Liar’s Poker was the primer for me before I had the firsthand experience in the deceiving culture of finance. Yes, you can make anything a security and create a illusional  market out of it. The Moneyball was the prefect guidebook to get any school kids into statistics. Everyone should read the Blindside before watching their first NFL game. The Bigshort just taught us why a person shouldn’t listen to the sales in Deutsche Bank to buy those toxic collateralized debt obligations with the US$ 20 million that he sold his company to Genentech for. Michael Lewis seems to have that story-telling magic wand to use actions of people, words of conversation, stories of stories, to translate extremely technical ideas into the yet another pager turner. He did all these by using very simple but engaging vocabulary that even I didn’t need to look into the dictionary too often (as if the Kindle dictionary is hard to use). 

The Undoing Project is the story of two geniuses, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobelist and the author of the world-renown book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (along with its infamous translated version in Taiwan), and his long-time collaborator, Amos Tversky. This is the story of how two of the smartest scientists ever exist figured out how human judgement is distorted by the context and personal experience, which led to all sorts of irrational decisions. If these topics sound hard, it’s only because they really are. I never thought that I would learn so much about the science behind psychology and the omnipresence of human bias, irrationality. But Michael Lewis made all these simple to follow with his magic writing. I guess the real paradox is that in doing so, this book, just like all other books by Michael Lewis, heavily used the personal actions and stories to make the information engaging. The book is written in a form of a love story where romance is not involved, more than an anecdote of scientific process. A reader like me can only be so intrigued by this book by how Michael Lewis played with the context.

I will leave everyone interested to explore the content, while I am under the obligation to read Thinking, Fast and Slow (in English, of course).

邁克爾·劉易斯再次做到了！在我整個成年時期，他的書籍一直是我理解這個非理性世界的參考資料。在我有欺騙性的金融文化的第一手經驗之前，Liar's Poker 是我的primer。是的，你可以做任何事情的security，創造一個虛幻的市場。 Moneyball 是獲得任何學校孩子統計資料的完美指南。每個人都應該閱讀Blindside，然後再觀看他們的第一場NFL比賽。 Big Short剛剛告訴我們為什麼一個人不應該聽德意志銀行的銷售來購買那些有毒的抵押債務，在他把2000萬美元賣給了Genentech公司後。邁克爾·劉易斯似乎有這個講故事的魔術棒來使用人的行動，談話的話語，故事的故事，將非常技術的想法轉化為另一個尋呼機。他通過使用非常簡單但有吸引力的詞彙來完成所有這些，即使我不需要經常查看字典（好像Kindle字典很難使用）。撤退項目是兩位天才的故事，諾貝爾文學家丹尼爾·卡尼曼（Daniel Kahneman），以及世界知名的“思想，快速，緩慢”一書（以及台灣臭名昭著的翻譯版本）和他的長期合作者阿莫斯特維斯基這就是兩位最聰明的科學家如何存在的故事，揭示了人類的判斷如何被背景和個人經驗扭曲，從而導致各種不合理的決定。如果這些話聽起來很難，那只是因為他們真的是這樣。我從來沒有想過我會學到很多關於心理學背後的科學和人類偏見無理的非理性。但邁克爾·劉易斯讓這些簡單的跟隨他的魔術寫作。我想真正的悖論是，在這樣做的時候，這本書就像邁克爾·劉易斯的所有其他書一樣，大量使用個人行為和故事來使信息受到影響。這本書是以不涉及浪漫的愛情故事的形式寫成的，而不是一個科學過程的軼事。像我這樣的讀者，只有Michael Lewis才能用這個上下文來看待這本書。我會讓大家有興趣探索內容，而我有義務閱讀Thinking, Fast and Slow（當然是英文，因為很明顯Google Translate還不能完整翻譯我用英文打的書評啊科科）


（喔，還要希望某大教授不要翻譯這本書）