Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project: How do ER surgeons avoid dumb, deadly mistakes? Ask their doctor

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In an excerpt from his new book Michael Lewis examines a Toronto doctor who helps trauma surgeons avoid errors in judgment when life and death are on the line. Doctors tended to see only what they were trained to see: That was another big reason bad things might happen to a patient inside a hospital. A patient received treatment for something that was obviously wrong with him, from a specialist oblivious to the possibility that some less obvious thing might also be wrong with him.

As Kahneman and Tversky long ago had pointed out, a person who is making a prediction – or a diagnosis – is allowed to ignore base rates only if he is completely certain he is correct.

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