Michael Lewis

Pourquoi prendre des décisions intelligentes quand on peut s'enrichir en prenant des décisions idiotes ?

« Un petit nombre de personnes – plus de dix, moins de vingt – paria directement contre le marché des subprimes, qui valait des milliers de milliards de dollars, et, par extension, contre le système financier dans son ensemble. Ce qui était en soi un fait remarquable : la catastrophe était prévisible, et pourtant seule une poignée de gens s’en rendait compte. » (p. 162)

The Mexicans, interestingly, had taken the new pandemic strategy of the United States and run with it. They’d Closed schools, and socially distanced the population in other ways that, studies would later show, shut down disease transmission. The CDC, by contrast, sent the message that each American school should make its own decision, which was a bit like telling a bunch of sixth graders that the homework was optional. A few schools closed, but the vast majority did not. The local public-health officials with the power to close the schools had no political cover to do what needed doing. In that moment it was clear to Richard And Carter that they’d be no cohesive national strategy.

« Ils tendaient […] à croire que les gens, et, par extension, les marchés, avaient trop de certitudes sur des choses par nature incertaines. » (p. 175)

« Eisman n’était pas seulement un cynique. Il avait dans sa tête une vision du monde de la finance qui n’avait rien à voir avec, et était moins flatteuse que, l’autoportrait dressé par le monde de la finance lui-même. » (p. 43)

By the early 1990s it was clear that « sabermetrics », the search for new baseball knowledge, was an activity that would take place mainly outside of baseball.

Chapter 4. Field of ignorance, p. 89

The Creature [David Beck] was the first thing to come out of Paul’s computer that the A’s scouting department signed. There were about to be a lot more. The 2002 draft was to be the first science experiment Billy Beane performed upon amateur players.

Chapter two. How to find a ballplayer, p. 21

« La jeunesse américaine ne s’est jamais rebellée contre la culture de l’argent. Pourquoi prendre la peine de renverser le monde de ses parents quand on peut l’acheter puis le revendre morceau par morceau ? » (p. 18)

« Si lever des fonds peut être un concours de circonstance, investir de façon intelligente est exactement le contraire. » (p. 79)

"It's hard to know how people select a course in life," Amos [Tversky] said. "The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits."

3. The Insider, p. 101

Israel without a psychology department was like Alabama without a football team.

3. The Insider, p. 87

To defend the Club against the new idea, the members has dot distort the idea.

Afterword: Inside Baseball's Religious War, p. 298

By late July - the trade deadline was July 31 - Billy’s antennae for bargains quivered. Shopping for players just before the deadline was like shopping for used designer dresses on the day after the Oscars, or for secondhand engagement rings in Reno.

Chapter Nine. The trading desk, p. 193

When you think of intellectuals influencing the course of human affairs you think of physics, or political theory, or economics. You think of John Maynard Keyne´s condescending line about men of action - how they believe themselves guided by their own ideas even when they are unwittingly in the thrall of some dead economist. You don’t think of baseball because you don’t think of baseball as having an intellectual underpinning. But it does, it had just never been seriously observed and closely questioned, in a writing style sufficiently compelling to catch the attention of the people who actually played baseball. Once it had been, it was only a matter of time - a long time - before some man of action seized on newly revealed truths to gain a competitive advantage.

Chapter five. The Jeremy Brown Blue Plate Special, p. 97

Mon gars, tu nous dois 1,2 milliards.

Amos wrote an article, addressed directly to economists, to repair technical flaws in prospect theory. "Advances in Prospect Theory", it was called, and though Amos did much of the work on it with his graduate student Richard Gonzalez, it ran as a journal article by Danny and Amos. "Amos said that it had always been Kahneman and Tversky and that this had to be Kahneman and Tversky, and that it would be really strange to add a third person to it", said Gonzalez.

12 This cloud of possibility, p. 322

"The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices - that idea was alien to economics," he [Richard Thaler] said.

10 The isolation effect, p. 282

Danny was a pessimist. Amos was not merely an optimist ; Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he has decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos like to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

5 The Collision, p. 155

By 1981, in response to a pile of letters asking him what he thought about a new baseball offense model created by the sports journalist Thomas Boswell, James was able and willing to write that « the world needs another offensive rating system like Custer needed more Indians (or, for that matter, like the Indians needed another Custer)…. What we really need is for the amateurs to clear the floor. » There was now such a thing as intellectually rigorous baseball analysts. James had given the field of study its name: sabermatrics.

Chapter 4. Field of ignorance, p. 82

At the bottom of the Oakland experiment was a willingness to rethink baseball: how it is managed, how it is played, who is best suited to play it, and why. Understanding that he would never have a Yankee-sized checkbook, the Oakland A's general manager, Billy Beane, had set about looking for inefficiencies in the game. Looking for, in essence, new baseball knowledge. In what amounted to a systematic scientific investigation of their sport, the Oakland front office had reexamined everything from the market price of foot speed to the inherent difference between the average major league player and the superior Triple-A one. That's how they found their bargains. Many of the players drafted or acquired by the Oakland A's ahd been the victims of an unthinking prejudice rooted in baseball's traditions. The research and development department in the Oakland front office liberated them from this prejudice, and allowed them to demonstrate their true worth. A baseball team, of all things, was at the center of a story about possibilities - and the limits - of reason in human affairs. Baseball - of all things - was an example of how an unscientific culture responds, or fails, to respond, to the scientific method.

Preface, p. XIV