The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(92)
It wasn’t that Amos had no interest in Danny’s thoughts. It was that they were no longer talking in the same room, with the door closed. The conversation that he and Danny were meant to be having together, each was more or less having alone. Because of the new distance between them, each was far more aware where the ideas had come from. “We know who had the idea, because of the physical separation and because the idea is in a letter,” Amos would complain to Miles Shore. “Before, we would have picked up the phone at the beginning of an idea. Now you develop an idea and you become committed to them, and they become more personal and you remember you had them. Initially we never had that.”
Committed to his new idea, Danny had taken it back rather than let Amos take it apart and remake it into something more like his own. Amos continued to fly to Vancouver every other week, but there was a new tension between them. Amos clearly wished to believe that they might collaborate as they had before. Danny did not. He’d anticipated his own envy and built it into a decision about Amos.
* * *
* That strange fact comes from an excellent article on the subject of pilot illusions by Tom LeCompte in the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine.
12
THIS CLOUD OF POSSIBILITY
Amos was in Israel on a visit in 1984 when he received the phone call telling him that he’d been given a MacArthur “genius” grant. The award came with two hundred fifty thousand dollars, plus an extra fifty thousand dollars for research, a fancy health care plan, and a press release celebrating Amos as one of the thinkers who had exhibited “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” The only work of Amos’s cited in the press release was the work he’d done with Danny. It didn’t mention Danny.
Amos disliked prizes. He thought that they exaggerated the differences between people, did more harm than good, and created more misery than joy, as for every winner there were many others who deserved to win, or felt they did. The MacArthur became a case in point. “He wasn’t grateful for that prize,” said his friend Maya Bar-Hillel, who was with Amos in Jerusalem shortly after the prize was announced. “He was pissed. He said, ‘What are these people thinking? How can they give a prize to just one of a winning pair? Do they not realize they are dealing the collaboration a death blow?’” Amos didn’t like prizes but he kept on getting them anyway. Before the MacArthur “genius” grant, he had been admitted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Soon after the MacArthur, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an invitation to join the National Academy of Sciences. That last honor was seldom bestowed on scientists who weren’t U.S. citizens—and it wasn’t bestowed upon Danny. There would follow honorary degrees from Yale and the University of Chicago, among others. But the MacArthur was the prize Amos would dwell upon as an example of the damage caused by prizes. “He thought it was myopic beyond forgiveness,” said Bar-Hillel. “It was genuine agony. He wasn’t putting on a show for me.”
Along with the prizes came a steady drizzle of books and articles praising Amos for the work he had done with Danny, as if he had done it alone. When others spoke of their joint work, they put Danny’s name second, if they mentioned it at all: Tversky and Kahneman. “You are very generous in giving me credit for articulating the relationship between representativeness and psychoanalysis,” Amos wrote to a fellow psychologist who had sent Amos his new journal article. “These ideas, however, were developed in discussions with Danny so you should mention both our names or (if that appears awkward) omit mine.” An author of a book credited Amos with noticing the illusory sense of effectiveness felt by Israeli Air Force flight instructors after they’d criticized a pilot. “I am somewhat uncomfortable with the label the ‘Tversky effect,’” Amos wrote to the author. “This work has been done in collaboration with my long-time friend and colleague, Daniel Kahneman, so I should not be singled out. In fact, Daniel Kahneman was the one who observed the effect of pilots’ training, so if this phenomenon is to be named after a person it should be called the ‘Kahneman effect.’”
The American view of his collaboration with Danny mystified Amos. “People saw Amos as the brilliant one and Danny as the careful one,” said Amos’s friend and Stanford colleague Persi Diaconis. “And Amos would say: ‘It’s exactly the opposite!’”
Amos’s graduate students at Stanford gave him a nickname: Famous Amos. “You knew that everyone knew him, and you knew everyone wanted to hang out with him,” said Brown University professor of psychologist Steven Sloman, who studied with Amos in the late 1980s. The maddening thing is that Amos seemed almost indifferent to the attention. He happily ignored the ever-growing media requests. (“You probably won’t be better off after you have appeared on TV than before,” he said.) He tossed out as many invitations, unopened, as he acknowledged. None of this arose from a sense of modesty. Amos knew his own value. He didn’t need to make a point of not caring what people thought of him; he actually just didn’t care all that much. The deal Amos offered the encroaching world was that their interaction was to be on his terms.
And the world accepted the deal. United States congressmen called him for advice on bills they were drafting. The National Basketball Association called to hear his argument about statistical fallacies in basketball. The United States Secret Service flew him to Washington so that he could advise them on how to predict and deter threats to the political leaders under their protection. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization flew him to the French Alps to teach them about how people made decisions in conditions of uncertainty. Amos seemed able to walk into any problem, however alien to him, and make the people dealing with it feel as if he grasped its essence better than they did. The University of Illinois flew him to a conference about metaphorical thinking, for instance, only to have Amos argue that a metaphor was actually a substitute for thinking. “Because metaphors are vivid and memorable, and because they are not readily subjected to critical analysis, they can have considerable impact on human judgment even when they are inappropriate, useless, or misleading,” said Amos. “They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”