The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(91)

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If the Katz-Newcomb Lecture meant less to Amos than to Danny, it was because Amos’s life was now a sprint from one Katz-Newcomb Lecture to the next. He reminded at least one of his new graduate students at Stanford of a stand-up comic, traveling the world and working small nightclubs to test his material. “He thought by talking,” recalled his wife, Barbara. “You could hear him in the shower. You could hear him talking to himself. Through the door.” His children grew used to hearing their father alone in a room, talking. “It was a little bit like an insane person talking to himself,” said his son Tal. They’d see him coming home in his brown Honda, stopping and starting in the street in front of their house and talking. “He’d be going three miles an hour, then all of a sudden he’d gun it,” said his daughter, Dona. “He’d worked out the idea.”

In the weeks leading up to the Katz-Newcomb Lecture, in early April 1979, Amos was busy talking to the Soviet Union. He’d joined a delegation of ten prominent Western psychologists on a bizarre intellectual diplomatic mission. Soviet psychologists were then trying to persuade their government to admit mathematical psychology into the Russian Academy of Sciences and had asked their American counterparts for support. Two distinguished mathematical psychologists, William Estes and Duncan Luce, had taken it upon themselves to help them. The older guys made a short list of America’s leading mathematical psychologists. Most of them were ancient. Amos counted as one of the younger guys, along with his Stanford colleague Brian Wandell. “The older guys had this idea that we were going to rescue the image of psychology in the Soviet Union,” recalled Wandell. “Psychology flew in the face of Marxism. It was on the list of things that didn’t need to exist.”

It took about a day to realize why Marxism might feel that way. These particular Soviet psychologists were charlatans. “We were thinking there really were going to be scientists on the Soviet end,” said Wandell. “There weren’t.” The Soviets and the Americans took turns giving presentations. An American would give a learned talk about decision theory. His Soviet counterpart would rise and offer a talk that sounded completely insane—one guy spent his allotted time on his theory about how the brain waves caused by beer canceled the brain waves caused by vodka. “We’d get up and give a paper, and you know, it was okay,” said Wandell. “Then some Russian guy would get up and talk and we’d say, ‘Wow, that was weird.’ One was about how the meaning of life could be put into a formula and the formula might have some variable labeled E in it.”

With one exception, the Russians knew nothing about decision theory, and didn’t even seem particularly interested in the subject. “There was one guy,” said Wandell, “who gave this great talk, at least compared to the others.” That guy turned out to be a KGB agent, whose training in psychology consisted of the talk he had given. “The way we discovered he was a KGB guy was that he showed up later at a physics conference and gave a great talk there, too,” said Wandell. “That was the only guy Amos liked.”

They stayed in a hotel where the toilets didn’t flush and the heat didn’t work. Their rooms were bugged, and everywhere they went they were followed by guards. “People were pretty freaked out the first day or two,” said Wandell. “We were plainly in over our heads.” Amos found the whole thing hysterical. “They put a focus on Amos, probably because he was Israeli,” said Wandell. “In typical Amos fashion, he was walking around Red Square, and gives me this look that says, ‘C’mon, let’s lose ’em!’ Then he just kind of took off, with the guards chasing after him.” When they finally caught up to him—hiding in a department store—the Soviets were furious. “They gave us all a stern talking-to,” said Wandell.

Amos spent at least some of his time in his bugged and heatless hotel room adding to a file that he’d labeled “The Undoing Project.” The file in the end came to forty or so pages of handwritten notes. Between the lines, you can hear the polite throat clearing of a diamond cutter waiting for his rocks. Amos clearly had hopes of turning Danny’s ideas into a full-blown theory. Danny didn’t know that, or that Amos was busy dreaming up his own vignettes:

David P was killed in a plane crash. Which of the following is easier to imagine:

—that the plane did not crash

—that David P. took another plane

Instead of replying to Danny’s long letter, Amos made notes to himself, trying to order the stuff spilling out of Danny. “The present world is often surprising, i.e., less plausible than some of its alternatives,” he wrote. “We can order possible worlds by i) initial plausibility and ii) similarity to the present world.” He followed this a few days later with eight dense pages in which he attempted to create a logical, internally consistent theory of the imagination. “He loved these ideas,” said Barbara. “It’s something very basic about decision making that fascinated him. It’s the choice you don’t take.” He groped for titles, so that he might know what he was writing about. In his earliest notes in the file, he scribbled the phrase “the undoing heuristic” and gave the new theory the name “Possibility Theory.” He then changed it to “Scenario Theory,” and then again to “The Theory of Alternative States.” In the last notes he made on the subject, he called it “Shadow Theory.” “The major point of shadow theory,” Amos wrote to himself, “is that the context of alternatives or the possibility set determines our expectations, our interpretations, our recollection and our attribution of reality, as well as the affective states which it induces.” Toward the end of his thinking on the subject, he summed up a lot in a single sentence: “Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point.”