Sailer on “how much freer American writers were a couple of generations ago,” and other stuff

Steve Sailer writes:

While I probably prefer Lewis’ lucid, buttoned-down prose to Wolfe’s show-offy style, Wolfe’s heroically ambitious career reflects the Apollo 11-meets-Woodstock ambitions of his era’s America. In contrast, Lewis’ admirable but inoffensive books for frequent fliers seem about as good as an American journalist can do in this touchy era.

Three of Lewis’ nonfiction works have been made into hit movies: The Blind Side, Moneyball, and The Big Short. Perhaps to challenge Hollywood screenwriters to extend their range even more, Lewis has written his least filmable book yet, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, about the Israeli psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman and their research into common cognitive mistakes. (…)

Lewis himself isn’t the most cynical inquirer. He’s by no means as gullible as, say, Malcolm Gladwell, but he seems to have a prudent sense of how far to push his reality checks.

For example, it never seems to have occurred to him that Oakland A’s baseball general manager Billy Beane might not have drawn back the curtain on his statistical techniques for the benefit of Lewis’ Moneyball purely out of a disinterested love of advancing learning.

One possibility is that Lewis’ book served Beane’s need to permanently distract from the large role played in the success of the A’s by performance-enhancing drugs…