The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(102)

In 1993, he and Cornell statistician Robert Tibshirani created a complicated study to answer the question. The paper they wrote, in 1997, proved that talking on a cell phone while driving was as dangerous as driving with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit. A driver talking on a cell phone was four times as likely as a driver who wasn’t to be involved in a crash, whether or not he held the phone in his hands. That paper—the first to establish, rigorously, the connection between cell phones and car accidents—spurred calls for regulation around the world. It would take another, even more complicated study to determine just how many thousands of lives it saved.

The study also piqued Redelmeier’s interest in what happened inside the mind of a person behind the wheel of a car. The doctors in the Sunnybrook trauma center assumed that their jobs began when the human beings mangled on nearby Highway 401 arrived in the emergency room. Redelmeier thought it was insane for medicine not to attack the problem at its source. One point two million people on the planet died every year in car accidents, and multiples of that were maimed for life. “One point two million deaths a year worldwide,” said Redelmeier. “One Japanese tsunami every day. Pretty impressive for a cause of death that was unheard-of one hundred years ago.” When exercised behind the wheel of a car, human judgment had irreparable consequences: That idea now fascinated Redelmeier. The brain is limited. There are gaps in our attention. The mind contrives to make those gaps invisible to us. We think we know things we don’t. We think we are safe when we are not. “For Amos it was one of the core lessons,” said Redelmeier. “It’s not that people think they are perfect. No, no: They can make mistakes. It’s that they don’t appreciate the extent to which they are fallible. ‘I’ve had three or four drinks. I might be 5 percent off my game.’ No! You are actually 30 percent off your game. This is the mismatch that leads to ten thousand fatal accidents in the United States every year.”

It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.

Amos had said that, too. “Amos gave everyone permission to accept human error,” said Redelmeier. That was how Amos made the world a better place, though it was impossible to prove. The spirit of Amos was now present in everything Redelmeier did. It was present in his article about the dangers of driving while speaking on a cell phone—which Amos had read and commented upon. That was the article Redelmeier was working on when the call came with the news that Amos had died.



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Amos told very few people that he was dying, and, to those he did tell, he gave instructions not to spend a lot of time talking to him about it. He received the news in February 1996. From then on he spoke of his life in the past tense. “He called me when the doctor told him that it was the end of it,” said Avishai Margalit. “I came to see him. And he fetched me from the airport. And we were on our way to Palo Alto. And we stopped somewhere on the road, with a view, and talked, about death and about life. It was important to him that he had his death under control. And the feeling was that he was talking not about himself. Not about his death. There was a kind of stoic distance that was astonishing. He said, ‘Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.’” Amos seemed to understand that an early death was the price of being a Spartan.

In May Amos gave his final lecture at Stanford, about the many statistical fallacies in professional basketball. His former graduate student and collaborator Craig Fox asked Amos if he would like for it to be videotaped. “He thought about it and said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’” recalled Fox. With one exception, Amos didn’t change his routine, or even his interactions with those around him, in any way. The exception was that, for the first time, he spoke of his experience of war. For instance, he told Varda Liberman the story of how he had saved the life of the soldier who had fainted on top of the bangalore mine. “He said this one event in a way kind of shaped his entire life,” said Liberman. “He said, ‘Once I did that, I felt obliged to keep this image of hero. I did that, now I have to live up to it.’”

Most people with whom Amos interacted never even suspected he was ill. To a graduate student who asked if he would supervise his dissertation, Amos simply said, “I’m going to be very busy the next few years,” and sent him on his way. A few weeks before his death, he called his old friend Yeshu Kolodny in Israel. “He was very impatient, which never happened,” recalled Kolodny. “He said, ‘Listen, Yeshu, I’m dying. I take it not tragically. But I don’t want to talk to anyone. I need you to call our friends and tell them—and tell them not to call or visit.’” To his rule against visitors Amos made an exception for Varda Liberman, with whom he was finishing a textbook. He made another for Stanford president Gerhard Casper—but only because he’d gotten wind of Stanford’s plan to commemorate him, with a lecture series or a conference in his name. “Amos told Casper, ‘You can do anything you want,’” recalled Liberman. “ ‘But I beg you, don’t have a conference in my name with mediocre people who will talk about their work and how it is “related” to mine. Just put my name on a building. Or a room. Or a bench. You can put it on anything that is not moving.’”

He accepted very few phone calls. One he took came from the economist Peter Diamond. “I learned he was dying,” said Diamond. “And I learned he wasn’t taking phone calls. But I had just finished my report to the Nobel Committee.” Diamond wanted to let Amos know that he was on a very short list for the Nobel Prize in economics, to be awarded in the fall. But the Nobel Prize was awarded only to the living. He didn’t recall what Amos said to that, but Varda Liberman was in the room when Amos took the call. “I thank you very much for letting me know,” she heard Amos say. “I can assure you that the Nobel Prize is not on the list of things I’m going to miss.”