On this episode of Sparks, FiveThirtyEight’s monthly science podcast that runs in the What’s The Point feed, the team got to nerd out about cognitive biases and prediction through the lens of Michael Lewis’s latest book, “The Undoing Project.” Lewis writes about Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who started exploring how our brains systematically make mistakes and wound up inventing the field of behavioral economics. In the process, they changed the way we think — or at least how we think about thinking.
FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver joined science writers Maggie Koerth-Baker and Anna Maria Barry-Jester and senior editor Blythe Terrell to talk about the “cauldron of cognitive bias,” the 2016 election, probabilities and the difficulties of comprehending uncertainty.
In the second part of the podcast, coming out Friday, Nate sits down for an interview with Michael Lewis. We’ll post a link to that conversation here when it’s live. Thanks for listening, and let us know what you think.