The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(99)
At any rate, they’d always thought that the most outrageous version of the Linda problem was superfluous to the point they were making—that people judged by representativeness. The very first experiment, like their earlier work on human judgment, showed that plainly enough, and yet Gigerenzer didn’t mention it. He had found their weakest evidence and attacked it, as if it were the only evidence they had. Combining his peculiar handling of the evidence with what struck Danny and Amos as a willful misreading of their words, Gigerenzer gave talks and wrote articles with provocative titles like “How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear.” “Making cognitive illusions disappear was really making us disappear,” said Danny. “He was obsessed. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Gigerenzer came to be identified with a strain of thought known as evolutionary psychology, which had in it the notion that the human mind, having adapted to its environment, must be very well suited to it. It certainly wouldn’t be susceptible to systematic biases. Amos found that notion absurd. The mind was more like a coping mechanism than it was a perfectly designed tool. “The brain appears to be programmed, loosely speaking, to provide as much certainty as it can,” he once said, in a talk to a group of Wall Street executives. “It is apparently designed to make the best possible case for a given interpretation rather than to represent all the uncertainty about a given situation.” The mind, when it dealt with uncertain situations, was like a Swiss Army knife. It was a good enough tool for most jobs required of it, but not exactly suited to anything—and certainly not fully “evolved.” “Listen to evolutionary psychologists long enough,” Amos said, “and you’ll stop believing in evolution.”
Danny wanted to understand Gigerenzer better, perhaps even reach out to him. “I was always more sympathetic than Amos to the critics,” said Danny. “I tend to almost automatically take the other side.” He wrote to Amos to say that he thought the man might be in the grip of some mind-warping emotion. Perhaps they should sit down together and see if they might lead him to reason. “Even if it were true you should not say it,” Amos shot back, “and I doubt that it is true. An alternative hypothesis to which I lean is that he is much less emotional than you think, and that he is acting like a lawyer trying to score points to impress the uninformed jury, with little concern for the truth. . . . This does not make me like him more but it makes his behavior easier to understand.”
Danny agreed to help Amos “as a friend,” but it wasn’t long before Amos, once again, was making him miserable. They wrote, and rewrote, drafts of a response to Gigerenzer but at the same time wrote and rewrote the dispute between each other. Danny’s language was always too soft for Amos, and Amos’s language too harsh for Danny. Danny was always the appeaser, Amos the bully. They could agree on seemingly nothing. “I am so desperately unhappy at the idea of revisiting the GG postscript that I am almost ready to have a chance device (or a set of three judges) decide between our two versions,” Danny wrote to Amos. “I don’t feel like arguing about it, and what you write feels alien to me.” Four days later, after Amos had pressed on, Danny added, “On a day on which they announce the discovery of 40 billion new galaxies we argue about six words in a postscript. . . . It is remarkable how ineffective the number of galaxies is as an argument for giving up in the debate between ‘repeat’ and ‘reiterate.’” And then: “Email is the medium of choice at this stage. Every conversation leaves me upset for a long time, which I cannot afford.” To which Amos replied, “I do not get your sensitivity metric. In general, you are the most open minded and least defensive person I know. At the same time, you can get really upset because I rewrote a paragraph you like, or because you chose to interpret a totally harmless comment in an unintended negative way.”
One night in New York, while staying in an apartment with Amos, Danny had a dream. “And in this dream the doctor tells me I have six months to live,” he recalled. “And I said, ‘This is wonderful because no one would expect me to spend the last six months of my life working on this garbage.’ The next morning I told Amos.” Amos looked at Danny and said, “Other people might be impressed but I am not.” Even if you had only six months to live I’d expect you to finish this with me. Not long after that exchange, Danny read a list of the new members of the National Academy of Sciences, to which Amos had belonged for nearly a decade. Once again, Danny’s name wasn’t on the list. Once again, the differences between them were there for all to see. “I asked him, why haven’t you put me forward?” said Danny. “But I knew why.” Had their situations been reversed, Amos would never have wanted to be given anything on the strength of his friendship with Danny. At bottom, Amos saw Danny’s need as weakness. “I said, ‘That’s not how friends behave,’” said Danny.
And with that Danny left. Walked out. Never mind Gerd Gigerenzer, or the collaboration. He told Amos that they were no longer even friends. “I sort of divorced him,” said Danny.
Three days later Amos called Danny. He’d just received some news. A growth that doctors had discovered in his eye had just been diagnosed as malignant melanoma. The doctors had scanned his body and found it riddled with cancer. They were now giving him, at best, six months to live. Danny was the second person he’d called with the news. Hearing that, something inside Danny gave. “He was saying, ‘We’re friends, whatever you think we are.’”