The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(12)

At the bottom of the transformation in decision making in professional sports—but not only in professional sports—were ideas about the human mind, and how it functioned when it faced uncertain situations. These ideas had taken some time to seep into the culture, but now they were in the air we breathed. There was a new awareness of the sorts of systematic errors people might make—and so entire markets might make—if their judgments were left unchecked. There were reasons basketball experts could not see that Jeremy Lin was an NBA player, or could be blinded to the value of Marc Gasol by a single photograph of him, or would never see the next Shaquille O’Neal if he happened to be an Indian. “It was like a fish not knowing he is breathing water unless someone points it out,” Morey said of people’s awareness of their own mental processes. As it happens, someone had pointed it out.



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* Hunter actually started for the Celtics for a season and went on to a successful career in Europe.

? There’s no perfect way to measure the quality of a draft choice, but there’s a sensible one: comparing the player’s output in his first four years, the years the NBA team that drafts him also controls him, to the average output of players drafted in that slot. By that measure, Carl Landry and Aaron Brooks were the 35th and 55th best picks of the six hundred or so picks made by NBA teams in the last decade.

? Before the 2015 season, DeAndre Jordan signed a four-year contract with the Clippers that guaranteed him $87,616,050, then the NBA’s maximum salary. Joey Dorsey signed a one-year deal for $650,000 with Galatasaray Liv Hospital of the Turkish Basketball League.

§ Gasol became a two-time All-Star (2012, 2015) and, by Houston’s reckoning, the third-best pick made by the entire NBA over the past decade, after Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin.

? In 2015 Tyler Harvey, a shooting guard out of Eastern Washington, made the rounds. When asked whose game his most resembled, he said, “To be honest with you, I’m most like Steph Curry,” and he would go on to say that, as had been the case with Steph Curry, big colleges had taken no interest in him. A total lack of appeal to college basketball coaches was now a good thing! Harvey was taken late in the second round of the draft with the 51st overall pick. “If Curry doesn’t exist, no way he [Harvey] is drafted,” said Morey.

** They made the trade, and then used the draft pick as the biggest chit in a deal to land a superstar, James Harden.

?? As of this writing, it is still too early to tell.





2



THE OUTSIDER

Of Danny Kahneman’s many doubts the most curious were the ones he had about his own memory. He’d delivered entire semesters of lectures straight from his head without a note. To his students he’d seemed to have memorized entire textbooks, and he wasn’t shy about asking them to do it, too. And yet when he was asked about some event in his past, he’d say that he didn’t trust his memory and so you shouldn’t, either. Possibly this was a simple extension of what amounted to Danny’s life strategy of not trusting himself. “His defining emotion is doubt,” said one of his former students. “And it’s very useful. Because it makes him go deeper and deeper and deeper.” Or maybe he just wanted another line of defense against anyone hoping to figure him out. In any case, he kept at a great distance the forces and events that had shaped him.

He might not trust his memories, but he still had a few. For instance, he remembered the time in late 1941 or early 1942—at any rate, a year or more after the start of the German occupation of Paris—when he was caught on the streets after curfew. The new laws required him to wear the yellow Star of David on the front of his sweater. His new badge caused him such deep shame that he took to going to school half an hour early so that the other children wouldn’t see him walking into the building wearing it. After school, on the streets, he’d turn his sweater inside out.

Heading home too late one evening, he saw a German soldier approaching. “He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others—the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers,” he recalled, in the autobiographical statement required of him by the Nobel Committee. “As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

He also remembered the sight of his father after he’d been taken away in a big sweep in November 1941. Thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent to camps. Danny had complicated feelings about his mother. His father he’d simply loved. “My father was radiant; he had enormous charm.” He was jailed in the makeshift prison in Drancy, outside of Paris. In Drancy, public housing designed for seven hundred people was used to imprison as many as seven thousand Jews at a time. “I have this memory of going with my mother to see this prison,” Danny recalled. “And I remember it was sort of pink-orange. There were people, but you couldn’t see the faces. You could hear women and children. And I remember the prison guard. He said, ‘It’s hard in there. They are eating peels.’” For most Jews, Drancy was just a stop on the way to a concentration camp: Upon arrival, many of the children were separated from their mothers and put on trains to be gassed at Auschwitz.