The Undoing Project

by Michael Lewis

  After the battles Amnon just wanted to get away from it all. “I was a little bit wild after two years in the tank,” he said. “I wanted to go as far away as possible. Flying out of the country was too expensive.” Israelis in the 1950s didn’t talk about combat stress or its discontents: They just dealt with it. He took a job in a copper mine in the desert just north of the Red Sea—said to be one of the legendary mines of King Solomon. His math skills were better than any of the other workers’, most of whom were prison labor, and so he was made the mine’s bookkeeper. Among the conveniences that King Solomon’s mine was unable to provide was a toilet, or toilet paper. “I went out to take—excuse me—to take a shit. I saw a note in the newspaper that I took to wipe my ass. It said they were opening a psychology department at Hebrew University.” He was twenty years old. What he knew of psychology was Freud and Jung—“there were not many textbooks in psychology in Hebrew”—but the subject interested him. He couldn’t say why. Nature had called, psychology had answered.

  Entrance into Israel’s first psychology department, unlike entrance into most Hebrew University departments, was to be competitive. A few weeks after he’d read the ad in the newspaper, Amnon stood in line outside the monastery that served as Hebrew University, waiting to take a series of bizarre tests—including one designed by Danny Kahneman, who had written a page of prose in a language he had invented so that applicants might attempt to decipher its grammatical structure. The line of applicants ran down the block. There were only twenty or so spots in the new department, but hundreds of people wanted into it: An amazing number of young Israelis, in 1957, wanted to know what made people tick. The talent was also incredible: Of the twenty people admitted, nineteen went on to earn their doctorates, and the one who didn’t was a woman who, scoring one of the top marks on the admissions test, then had her career derailed by children. Israel without a psychology department was like Alabama without a football team.

  In line beside Amnon stood a small, pale, baby-faced soldier. He looked about fifteen but he wore, almost absurdly, the high, rubber-soled boots and crisp uniform and red beret of the Israeli paratrooper. The new Spartan. Then he started to speak. His name was Amos Tversky. Amnon wouldn’t remember exactly what he had said but he’d remember, vividly, how he’d felt about it. “I was not as smart as he was. I understood it immediately.”

  * * *

  To his fellow Israelis, Amos Tversky somehow was, at once, the most extraordinary person they had ever met and the quintessential Israeli. His parents were among the pioneers who had fled Russian anti-Semitism in the early 1920s to build a Zionist nation. His mother, Genia Tversky, was a social force and political operator who became a member of the first Israeli Parliament, and the next four after that. She sacrificed her private life for public service and didn’t agonize greatly about the choice. She was often gone—she spent two years of Amos’s early childhood in Europe, helping the U.S. Army liberate the concentration camps and resettle the survivors. Upon her return she spent more time at the Knesset in Jerusalem than at home.

  Amos had a sister, but she was thirteen years older, and he was raised, in effect, as an only child. The person who did most of that raising was his father, a veterinarian who spent much of his time treating livestock. (Israelis couldn’t afford pets.) Yosef Tversky, the son of a rabbi, despised religion and loved Russian literature, and found a great deal of amusement in what came out of the mouths of his fellow human beings. His father had turned away from an early career in medicine, Amos explained to friends, because “he thought animals had more real pain than people and complained a lot less.” Yosef Tversky was a serious man. At the same time, when he talked about his life and work, he brought his son to his knees with laughter about his experiences, and about the mysteries of existence. “This work is dedicated to my father, who taught me to wonder,” Amos would one day write at the opening of his PhD dissertation.

  Amos was fond of saying that interesting things happened to people who could weave them into interesting stories. He, too, could tell a story, with startlingly original effect. He spoke with a slight lisp that reminded some of the way that Catalans spoke Spanish. He was so pale that his skin was almost translucent. Whether he was speaking or listening, his pale blue eyes darted back and forth, as if searching for an approaching thought.

  Even as he spoke, he gave the impression of constant motion. He wasn’t conventionally athletic—he was always small—but he was loose-jointed and fast: twitchy and incredibly agile. He had an almost feral ability to run at great speed up and down mountains. One of his favorite tricks—he’d sometimes do this as he told a story—was to place himself on a high surface, whether a rock or a table or an army tank, and fall face-first toward the ground. His body perfectly horizontal to the earth, he’d fall until people shrieked and then he’d pull himself up at the last moment and somehow land on his feet. He loved the sensation of falling, and the view of the world from above.

  Amos was also physically brave, or at least intent on seeming so. Not long after his parents moved him from Jerusalem, in 1950, to the coastal city of Haifa, he found himself at a swimming pool with other kids. The pool had a ten-meter diving platform. The kids challenged him to jump off it. Amos was twelve years old but didn’t yet know how to swim. In Jerusalem, during the war of independence, they hadn’t had water to drink, much less to fill swimming pools with. Amos found a big kid and said, I’m going to do this, but I need you to be in the pool when I land, to pull me up from the bottom. Amos jumped, and the big kid rescued him from drowning and pulled him out of the pool.

  Entering high school, Amos, like all Israeli kids, needed to decide if he would specialize in math and science or in the humanities. The new society exerted great pressure on boys to study math and science. That’s where the status was, and the future careers. Amos had a gift for math and science, perhaps more than any other boy. And yet alone among the bright boys in his class—and to the bemusement of all—he pursued the humanities. Another risky leap into the unknown: He could teach himself math, Amos said, and he couldn’t ignore the thrill of studying with the humanities teacher, a man named Baruch Kurzweil. “In contrast to most of the teachers, who spread boredom and superficiality, I’m full of enjoyment and amazement in his classes in Hebrew literature and philosophy,” Amos wrote to his older sister Ruth, who had moved to Los Angeles. Amos wrote poetry for Kurzweil and told people he planned to become a poet or a literary critic.*

  He formed an intense, private, possibly romantic relationship with a new student named Dahlia Ravikovitch. She’d turned up one day, morosely, in their high school class. After her father’s death she’d lived on a kibbutz, which she loathed, then bounced unhappily through a series of foster homes. She was the picture of social alienation, or at any rate the 1950s Israeli version of it, and yet Amos, the most popular kid in the school, took up with her. The other kids didn’t know what to make of it. Amos still looked like a boy; Dahlia seemed, in every way, already a grown woman. He loved the outdoors and games; she . . . well, when all the other girls went out to gym class, she sat at the window and smoked. Amos loved being with big groups of people; Dahlia was a loner. It was only later, when Dahlia’s poetry claimed Israel’s highest literary prizes and she became a global sensation, that people said, “Oh, that made sense. Two geniuses.” Just as it made sense, after Baruch Kurzweil became Israel’s most prominent literary critic, that Amos had wanted to study with him. But it did, and it didn’t. Amos was the most insistently upbeat person anyone knew. Dahlia, like Kurzweil, attempted suicide. (Kurzweil succeeded.)

  Like a lot of the Jewish kids in Haifa in the early 1950s, Amos joined a leftist youth movement called the Nahal. He was soon elected a leader. The Nahal—the word was an acronym for the Hebrew phrase meaning “Fighting Pioneer Youth”—was a vehicle to move young Zionists from school onto kibbutzim. The idea was that they would serve as soldiers and guard the farm for a couple of years and then become farmers.r />
  During Amos’s final year in high school, the swashbuckling Israeli general Moshe Dayan came to Haifa to speak to the students. A boy who happened to be in the audience recalls, “He says all those who go to the Nahal, raise your hands? A huge number did. Dayan says, ‘You are traitors. We don’t want you growing tomatoes and cucumbers. We want you fighting.’” The next year every youth group in Israel was asked to pick twelve kids out of every hundred to serve their country not as farmers but paratroopers. Amos looked more like a boy scout than an elite soldier, but he volunteered immediately. Too light to qualify, he drank water until he made weight.

  At paratrooper school Amos and the other young men were turned into symbols of the new country: warriors and killing machines. Cowardice wasn’t an option. Once they’d proven that they could jump to the ground from a height of eighteen feet without breaking anything, they were taken up in old World War II planes built of wood. The propeller was at the same level as the door but just in front of it, so there was this strong gust of wind to throw you backward the moment you stepped out. The light on the door was red. They checked each other’s equipment until the light turned green, and, one by one, they moved forward: Anyone who hesitated was pushed out.

  The first few jumps, a lot of the young men hesitated; they needed a little push. One kid in Amos’s group refused to jump and was ostracized for the rest of his life. (“It took real bravery not to jump,” a former paratrooper later said.) Amos never hesitated. “He was always on the extreme end of enthusiastic when it came to jumping out of airplanes,” recalls fellow paratrooper Uri Shamir. He jumped fifty times, maybe more. He jumped behind enemy lines. He jumped into battle in 1956, in the Sinai campaign. Once, he jumped by accident into a hornet’s nest and was stung so badly he passed out. After university, in 1961, he flew for the first time in his life without a parachute, to graduate school in the United States. As his plane descended, he looked at the earth below with genuine curiosity, turned to the person sitting beside him, and said, “I’ve never landed.”

  * * *

  Soon after he joined the paratroopers, Amos became a platoon commander. “It is amazing how quickly one is able to adapt to a new way of life,” he wrote to his sister in Los Angeles. “The boys my age were no different than I was other than the two stripes on my arm. Now they salute me and follow my every command: to run and to crawl. And now this relationship is accepted, even by me, and seems natural to me.” The letters Amos wrote home were censored and offer only a glimpse of his combat experience. He was sent on reprisal missions, which invited atrocities on both sides. He lost men, and saved them. “During one of our ‘payback missions,’ I saved one of my soldiers and received honorable mention,” he wrote to his sister. “I did not think I had done anything heroic, I just wanted my soldiers to return home safely.”

  There were other ordeals, of which he did not write, and seldom spoke. A sadistic senior Israeli officer wanted to test how far men could travel without their usual provisions and deprived them of water for great stretches. The experiment ended when one of Amos’s men died of dehydration; Amos testified against his commanding officer at the latter’s court-martial. One night Amos’s men threw a blanket over another sadistic officer’s head and beat him savagely. Amos didn’t join in the beating, but in the subsequent investigation, he helped the men who had done it avoid prosecution. “When they ask you questions, just bore them with lots of irrelevant details and they will be thrown off the scent,” he told them, and it had worked.

  By late 1956, Amos was not merely a platoon commander but a recipient of one of the Israeli army’s highest awards for bravery. During a training exercise in front of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, one of his soldiers was assigned to clear a barbed wire fence with a bangalore torpedo. From the moment he pulled the string to activate the fuse, the solider had twenty seconds to run for cover. The soldier pushed the torpedo under the fence, yanked the string, fainted, and collapsed on top of the explosive. Amos’s commanding officer shouted for everyone to stay put—and leave the unconscious soldier to die. Amos ignored him and sprinted from behind the wall that served as cover for his unit, grabbed the soldier, picked him up, hauled him ten yards, tossed him on the ground, and threw himself on top of him. The shrapnel from the explosion remained in Amos for the rest of his life. The Israeli army did not bestow honors for bravery lightly. As he handed Amos his award, Moshe Dayan, who had watched the entire episode, said, “You did a very stupid and brave thing and you won’t get away with it again.”

  Occasionally, people who watched Amos in action sensed that he was more afraid of being thought unmanly than he was actually brave. “He was always very gung ho,” recalled Uri Shamir. “I thought it was maybe compensation for being thin and weak and pale.” At some point it didn’t matter: He compelled himself to be brave until bravery became a habit. And as his time in the army came to an end he clearly sensed a change in himself. “I cannot rid myself of the feeling that you would almost not know me today,” Amos wrote to his sister. “Letters cannot convey the drastic changes of a boy in an army uniform that you will meet. He will be very different from the young boy in khaki shorts that you left at the airport five years ago.”

  Apart from that short note, Amos seldom mentioned his army experiences, in print or conversation, unless it was to tell a funny or curious story—how, for instance, during the Sinai campaign, his battalion captured a train of Egyptian fighting camels. Amos had never ridden a camel, but when the military operation ended, he won the competition to ride the lead camel home. He got seasick after fifteen minutes and spent the next six days walking the caravan across the Sinai.

  Or how his soldiers, even in combat, refused to wear their helmets, claiming that the weather was too hot for them and “if a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it anyway.” (To which Amos said, “What about all those bullets addressed ‘To Whom It May Concern’?”) More typically Amos’s stories began with some offhand observation of the world around him. “Almost always when he encountered you he would start the conversation with ‘Did I tell you this story?’” recalls Samuel Sattath, an Israeli mathematician. “But the stories were not about him. He would say, for example, ‘You know, in an Israeli university meeting, everyone jumps in to speak, because they think someone else might be about to say what they want to say. And in an American university faculty meeting, everyone is quiet, because they think someone else will think to say what they want to say . . .’” And he’d be off on a disquisition on the differences between Americans and Israelis—how Americans believed tomorrow will be better than today, while Israelis were sure tomorrow would be worse; how American kids always came to class prepared, while Israeli kids never did the reading, but it was Israeli kids who always had the bold idea, and so on.

  To those who knew Amos best, Amos’s stories were just an excuse to enjoy Amos. “People who knew Amos could talk of nothing else,” as one Israeli woman, a friend of long standing, put it. “There was nothing we liked to do more than to get together and talk about him, over and over and over.” There were—for starters—the stories about the funny things Amos had said, usually directed at people whom he found full of themselves. He had listened to an American economist talk about how so-and-so was stupid and so-and-so was a fool, then said, “All your economic models are premised on people being smart and rational, and yet all the people you know are idiots.” He’d heard Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, “You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are.” Once, after Amos gave a talk, an English statistician had approached him. “I don’t usually like Jews but I like you,” the statistician said. Amos replied, “I usually like Englishmen but I don’t like you.”

  The effect on others of whatever Amos said only led to even more stories about Amos. There was—to take just one example—the time that Tel Aviv U
niversity threw a party for a physicist who had just won the Wolf Prize. It was the discipline’s second-highest honor, and its winners more often than not went on to win the Nobel. Most of the leading physicists in the country came to the party, but somehow the prizewinner ended up in the corner with Amos—who had recently taken an interest in black holes. The next day the prizewinner called his hosts to ask, “Who was that physicist I was talking to? He never told me his name.” After some confusing back-and-forth, his hosts figured out that the man meant Amos, and they told him that Amos wasn’t a physicist but a psychologist. “It’s not possible,” the physicist said, “he was the smartest of all the physicists.”

  The Princeton philosopher Avishai Margalit said, “No matter what the topic was, the first thing Amos thought was in the top 10 percent. This was such a striking ability. The clarity and depth of his first reaction to any problem—any intellectual problem—was something mind-boggling. It was as if he was right away in the middle of any discussion.” Irv Biederman, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, said, “Physically he was unremarkable. In a room full of thirty people he’d be the last one you’d notice. And then he’d start to talk. Everyone who ever met him thought he was the smartest person they had ever met.” The University of Michigan psychologist Dick Nisbett, after he’d met Amos, designed a one-line intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you are, the smarter you are. “He would walk into a room,” recalled his close friend and collaborator Varda Liberman, a mathematician. “He didn’t look special. And the way he dressed said nothing. He’d sit there quietly. And then he would open his mouth and speak. And in no time he became the light that all the butterflies fly to; and in no time everyone would look up to him wanting to hear what he would say.”