Herbert Simon Quotes

...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

You do not change people's minds by defeating them with logic.

The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.

Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is entertaining (the more respectable word is interesting.)

We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Back in the seventies, Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. —HERBERT SIMON

The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us.

I advise my graduate students to pick a research problem that is important (so that it will matter if it is solved), but one for which they have a secret weapon that gives some prospect of success. Why a secret weapon? Because if the problem is important, other researchers as intelligent as my students will be trying to solve it; my students are likely to come in first only by having access to some knowledge or research methods the others do not have.

Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention . . .

... although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.

The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.

Coverage of material is a snare and a delusion. You begin where students are prepared to begin; and you carry them as far as you can without losing them.

We measure our success not only by the quality of teaching and research on our own campus, but by our influence on intellectual and educational trends in the nation and internationally.

To make interesting scientific discoveries, you should acquire as many good friends as possible who are energetic, intelligent and knowledgeable as they can be. You will find all the programs you need are stored in your friends, and will execute productively and creatively as long as you don't interfere too much.

There is no use in lecturing unless a class is listening. And they will only listen if you are saying something they think they can understand and seems relevant. If you pace up and down you can tell from their moving head whether they are following you.

Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly.

Artificial intelligence has had much the same effect as Darwin's theory. Both aroused in some people anxieties about their own uniqueness, value and worth.

One speaker, Herbert Simon, was a Carnegie Mellon professor of computer science and psychology who later won a Nobel for his work in economics. In his presentation, he warned that the growth of information could become a burden. Why? “Information consumes the attention of its recipients,” he explained, and “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”1

The greatest asset of the university has been its capacity for innovation. That capacity, in turn, rests partly on its traditions of small size, weak interdepartmental boundaries, and solid adminstrative support (or at least hunting licenses) for entrepreneurial undertakings.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friederich von Hayek who, in the decades after World War II, was their leading interpreter and defender. His defense did not rest primarily upon the supposed optimum attained by them but rather upon the limits of the inner environment—the computational limits of human beings:31

An entrepreneur is a broker between ideas and resources. This is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academia. Faculty members write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.

I quoted Herbert Simon’s definition of intuition in the introduction, but it will make more sense when I repeat it now: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Consider Herbert A. Simon, a right sharp scientific thinker, who did his thinking most frequently at Carnegie Mellon, by which I mean this chap was smart as shit. Check out some of his smart-thinks: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Slogan-worthy.

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating… even awe-inspiring, but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.

....it gets easier, not harder, to administer as you move upward in an organization.

Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is interesting.

We have adopted the policy of Sorel of propaganda of the deed. The best rhetoric comes from building and testing models and running experiments. Let philosophers weave webs of words; such webs break easily.

We see that reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there. It is a gun for hire that can be employed in the service of whatever goals we have, good or bad.

Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty—that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple. —Herbert Simon

People have to be motivated to contribute to the society, to produce. At the same time, they have to be protected if they are unable to take care of themselves. If the first is more important you're a Republican the second Democrat.

When I examine my experimental research, I find to my embarrassment I rarely provided a control condition. What could I have possibly learned from these ill-designed experiments? The answer (it surprised me) is that you can test theoretical models without a control condition.

I resolved to major in economics, until I learned that it required an accounting course. I switched to political science, which had no such requirement. (A strange beginning for someone who was later to be a founding father of a business school and a Nobel Laureate in economics.)

It is true that humanity is faced with many problems. It always has been but perhaps not always with such keen awareness of them as we have today. We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches. Our grandchildren cannot ask more of us than that we offer to them the same chance for adventure, for the pursuit of new and interesting designs, that we have had.

An artifact can be thought of as a meeting point—an “interface” in today’s terms—between an “inner” environment, the substance and organization of the artifact itself, and an “outer” environment, the surroundings in which it operates. If the inner environment is appropriate to the outer environment, or vice versa, the artifact will serve its intended purpose.

Let’s watch: Damasio reported that the purely unemotional man was incapable of making the simplest decision. He could not get out of bed in the morning, and frittered away his days fruitlessly weighing decisions. Shock! This flies in the face of everything one would have expected: One cannot make a decision without emotion. Now, mathematics gives the same answer: If one were to perform an optimizing operation across a large collection of variables, even with a brain as large as ours, it would take a very long time to decide on the simplest of tasks. So we need a shortcut; emotions are there to prevent us from temporizing. Does it remind you of Herbert Simon’s idea? It seems that the emotions are the ones doing the job.

A jaw like a mastiff's, a frame like a giant's, eyes like two daggers, a smile like a tiger's snarl,"Bernard murmured. "Aye, he is all that!!" Master Herbert said."A murrain be on him! And when I came to him,what did I do? I did bow in all politeness, yet stiffly withal to show him I'd not brook his surliness." "I did hear ye did bow so low that your head came below your knees,"Bernard said.

It is not my aim to surprise or shock you—but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that can think, that can learn and that can create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future - the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.

In essence our failure was a vivid demonstration, which I have never forgotten, that theories, however plausible and “obviously” valid, can be destroyed totally by the obstinate facts of the real world. Davis had brought us an unbeatable scheme for raising cattle profitably. The cattle had a different scheme. No doubt my later deep skepticism of the a priorism of mainstream economics had some of its origins in this experience.

It should not be supposed that every advance in human knowledge increases the amount of information that has to be mastered by professionals. On the contrary, some of the most important progress in science is the discovery and testing of powerful new theories that allow large numbers of facts to be subsumed under a few general principles. There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories. Hence it is not safe to say that the professional chemist must learn more today than a half century ago, before the general laws of quantum mechanics were announced.

When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work. Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.

Yet just eighty years ago it still seemed an impossible mission when U.S. President Herbert Hoover was tasked with beating back the Great Depression with only a mixed bag of numbers, ranging from share values to the price of iron to the volume of road transport. Even his most important metric – the “blast-furnace index” – was little more than an unwieldy construct that attempted to pin down production levels in the steel industry. If you had asked Hoover how “the economy” was doing, he would have given you a puzzled look. Not only because this wasn’t among the numbers in his bag, but because he would have had no notion of our modern understanding of the word “economy.” “Economy” isn’t really a thing, after all – it’s an idea, and that idea had yet to be invented. In 1931, Congress called together the country’s leading statisticians and found them unable to answer even the most basic questions about the state of the nation. That something was fundamentally wrong seemed evident, but their last reliable figures dated from 1929. It was obvious that the homeless population was growing and that companies were going bankrupt left and right, but as to the actual extent of the problem, nobody knew. A few months earlier, President Hoover had dispatched a number of Commerce Department employees around the country to report on the situation. They returned with mainly anecdotal evidence that aligned with Hoover’s own belief that economic recovery was just around the bend. Congress wasn’t reassured, however. In 1932, it appointed a brilliant young Russian professor by the name of Simon Kuznets to answer a simple question: How much stuff can we make? Over the next few years, Kuznets laid the foundations of what would later become the GDP. His

When Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of “satisficing” in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved in getting information about all the options are factored in, satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy.

A similar method was used by the late Carnegie Mellon psychology professor Herbert Simon. He won the Nobel Prize in economics, was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, and is widely regarded as among the most imaginative and productive behavioral scientists of all time. Simon didn’t read newspapers or watch television to get news. He said that when something important happened, people always told him, so it was a waste of time. Simon even made this point in a speech he gave to the National Association of Newspaper Editors, who were not amused. “I’ve saved an enormous amount of time since 1934, when I cast my first vote,” Simon told them, and he went on to say, it had left him more time to focus on his research.

In 1971, renowned social scientist Herbert Simon observed, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” - Herbert Simon

赫尔伯特·西蒙（Herbert A. Simon）曾对“学习”给出以下定义：“如果一个系统能够通过执行某个过程改进它的性能，这就是学习。

Memory has been discussed here as though it consisted mainly of a body of data. But experts possess skills as well as knowledge. They acquire not only the ability to recognize situations or to provide information about them; they also acquire powerful special skills for dealing with situations as they encounter them. Physicians prescribe and operate as well as diagnose. The boundary between knowledge and skill is subtle. For example, when we write a computer program in any language except machine language, we are really not writing down processes but data structures. These data structures are then interpreted or compiled into processes that is, into machine-language instructions that the computer can understand and execute. Nevertheless for most purposes it is convenient for us simply to ignore the translation step and to treat the computer programs in higher-level languages as representing processes.

(Herbert Simon said it best: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”)

Some economists used to model people as rational agents, idealized decision makers who always choose whatever action is optimal in pursuit of their goal, but this is obviously unrealistic. In practice, these agents have what Nobel laureate and AI pioneer Herbert Simon termed “bounded rationality” because they have limited resources: the rationality of their decisions is limited by their available information, their available time to think and their available hardware with which to think. This means that when Darwinian evolution is optimizing an organism to attain a goal, the best it can do is implement an approximate algorithm that works reasonably well in the restricted context where the agent typically finds itself.

Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity John Gribbin, Random House (2005) F.F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader Frank Partnoy, Penguin Books (1999) Ice Age John & Mary Gribbin, Barnes & Noble (2002) How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It Arthur Herman, Three Rivers Press (2002) Models of My Life Herbert A. Simon The MIT Press (1996) A Matter of Degrees: What Temperature Reveals About the Past and Future of Our Species, Planet, and Universe Gino Segre, Viking Books (2002) Andrew Carnegie Joseph Frazier Wall, Oxford University Press (1970) Guns Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies Jared M. Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Jared Nt[. Diamond, Perennial (1992) Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini, Perennial Currents (1998) The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin franklin, Yale Nota Bene (2003) Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos Garrett Hardin, Oxford University Press (1995) The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press (1990) Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. Ron Chernow, Vintage (2004) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor David Sandes, W. W Norton & Company (1998) The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategist Robert G. Hagstrom, Wiley (2000) Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters Matt Ridley, Harper Collins Publishers (2000) Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giz.ting In Roger Fisher, William, and Bruce Patton, Penguin Books Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information Robert Wright, Harper Collins Publishers (1989) Only the Paranoid Survive Andy Grove, Currency (1996 And a few from your editor... Les Schwab: Pride in Performance Les Schwab, Pacific Northwest Books (1986) Men and Rubber: The Story of Business Harvey S. Firestone, Kessinger Publishing (2003) Men to Match My Mountains: The Opening of the Far West, 1840-1900 Irving Stone, Book Sales (2001)

What is the cost of all that distraction? In 1971 the psychologist Herbert A. Simon presciently wrote, “The wealth of information means a dearth of something else . . . a poverty of attention.” Researchers tell us attention and focus are the raw materials of human creativity and flourishing. In the age of increased automation, the most sought-after jobs are those that require creative problem-solving, novel solutions, and the kind of human ingenuity that comes from focusing deeply on the task at hand.

«Disciplines, like nations, are a necessary evil that enable human beings of bounded rationality to simplify their goals and reduce their choices to calculable limits. But parochialism is everywhere, and the world badly needs international and interdisciplinary travelers to carry new knowledge from one enclave to another.» Herbert Simon

A recognition of the impossibility of exact perfection lay behind the work of a few economists, such as Herbert Simon’s satisficing, Ronald Coase’s transaction costs, George Shackle’s and Israel Kirzner’s reaffirmation of the old Yogi Berra jest: it’s hard to predict, especially about the future.

If science is to encompass these objects and phenomena in which human purpose as well as natural law are embodied, it must have means for relating these two disparate components. The character of these means and their implications for certain areas of knowledge economics, psychology, and design in particular are the central concern of this book.

We are all Expressionists part of the time. Sometimes we just want to scream loudly at injustice, or to stand up and be counted. These are noble motives, but any serious revolutionist must often deprive himself of the pleasures of self-expression. He must judge his actions by their ultimate effects on institutions.

Back in 1971, Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978, warned that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” This is much worse today, in particular for decision-makers who tend to be overloaded with too much “stuff” – overwhelmed and on overdrive, in a state of constant stress.

title of many of his books and ultimately his autobiography: Models of Man (1957), Models of Discovery (1977), Models of Thought (1979 and 1989), Models of Bounded Rationality (1982), and Models of My Life (1991).

Herbert Simon, an American economist and cognitive psychologist, wrote, “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…

The word satisfice is a combination of the words satisfy and suffice. It’s a term that Herbert Simon coined in the 1950s, and it represents what we should shoot for rather than something that is guaranteed to optimize and maximize our happiness.

One of the most overlooked aspects of excellence is how much work it takes. Fame can come easily and overnight, but excellence is almost always accompanied by a crushing workload, pursued with single-minded intensity. Strenuous effort over long periods of time is a repetitive theme in the biographies of the giants, sometimes taking on mythic proportions (Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel). Even the most famous supposed exception, Mozart, illustrates the rule. He was one of the lighter spirits among the giants, but his reputation for composing effortlessly was overstated—Mozart himself complained on more than one occasion that it wasn’t as easy as it looked1—and his devotion to his work was as single-minded as Beethoven’s, who struggled with his compositions more visibly. Consider the summer of 1788. Mozart was living in a city that experienced bread riots that summer and in a country that was mobilizing for war. He was financially desperate, forced to pawn his belongings to move to cheaper rooms. He even tried to sell the pawnbroker’s tickets to get more loans. Most devastating of all, his beloved six-month old daughter died in June. And yet in June, July, and August, he completed two piano trios, a piano sonata, a violin sonata, and three symphonies, two of them among his most famous.2 It could not have been done except by someone who, as Mozart himself once put it, is “soaked in music,…immersed in it all day long.”3 Psychologists have put specific dimensions to this aspect of accomplishment. One thread of this literature, inaugurated in the early 1970s by Herbert Simon, argues that expertise in a subject requires a person to assimilate about 50,000 “chunks” of information about the subject over about 10 years of experience—simple expertise, not the mastery that is associated with great accomplishment.4 Once expertise is achieved, it is followed by thousands of hours of practice, study, labor.5 Nor is all of this work productive. What we see of the significant figures’ work is typically shadowed by an immense amount of wasted effort—most successful creators produce clunkers, sometimes far more clunkers than gems.6

NOBEL-PRIZE-WINNING economist Herbert Simon introduced the concept of ‘satisficing’ into the science of problem solving. His point was that the solutions preferred by business, throughout human endeavours and by the mind itself are not usually the best ones but the good-enough ones – the ones that ‘satisfice’ the need rather than perfectly satisfy it.

Psychologist Herbert Simon explained: “If we wish to know what form gelatin will take when it solidifies, we do not study the gelatin; we study the shape of the mold in which we are going to pour it.… The same strategy can be used to construct a psychology of thinking.

silos are not neutral pits of preferred information. Online, they are structured by platforms that want you to consume that information as long as possible. The problem, though, is that information consumes us, too. Nobel laureate economist Herbert A. Simon figured this out back in 1971. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. —Herbert Simon, Designing Organization for an Information Rich World

Now, in cross-examination, the witnesses Asquith, George, Grey, Simon, Runciman, and indeed nearly all the plaintiffs, have confessed that they have been guilty from time to time of legislation, or proposals for legislation, of which the main purpose was to make people do something which they did not wish to do, or prevent people from doing something they did wish to do. Few of them could point to an item in their legislative programmes which had any other purpose, and, with the single exception of Mr. Haddock, they have no legislation to suggest of which the purpose is to allow people to do something which they cannot do already. On the contrary, it appears, they are as anxious as any other party in Parliament to make rules and regulations for the eating, drinking, sleeping, and breathing of the British citizen... Mr. Haddock's own programme is simple: (a) to propose no legislation unless its purpose is to allow people to do what they like, and (b) to support no legislation whose purpose is to stop people from doing what they like. "Which is the Liberal Party?

You do not change people's minds by defeating them with logic.

I had almost no background for the work in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology...Interdisciplinary adventure is easiest in new fields.

How does one instill curiosity? Without it this 'educational' process is a continual struggle between a student who is trying to get by and a teacher who is trying to catch him at it, neither profiting.

Students don't learn by being lectured at; then learn by thinking hard, solving problems and dissecting proofs.

Students are prepared to tolerate any other form of incompetence in an instructor, but not hostility.

People have to be motivated to contribute to the society, to produce. At the same time, they have to be protected if they are unable to take care of themselves. If the first is more important you're roughly a Republican the second Democrat.

Only people who believe deeply and almost fanatically in a dream can struggle so hard with inner doubt and conflict, and without losing, in the presence of frequent disagreement on particulars, a deep sense of purpose and mutual respect.

Though our vocabularies were different, we both view the human mind as a symbol-manipulating (my term) or information processing (Al Newell) system.

I was transformed...because I caught a glimpse of a revolutionary use for computers. We seized the opportunity to the computer as a general processor for symbols (hence thoughts) rather than just a speedy engine for arithmetic.

We invented a computer program capable of thinking non-numerically, and thereby solved and venerable mind/body problem, explaining how a system composed of matter can have the properties of mind. Opening the way to automate tasks that had previously required human intelligence.

We invented a whole new class of computer programming languages known as list processing languages. The basic idea is that whenever a piece of information is stored in memory, additional information should be stored with it telling where to find the next associated piece of information.

Money does not guarantee excellence. Although university salaries and faculty quality are correlated, the correlation is far from perfect.

If you examine the list of Fellows of the Econometrics Society in 1954 you will find the names of 20 of the first 27 prizewinners. I was a duly certified member of the Econometric Mafia...Without that accreditation, I suspect I would not have won the prize.

..it may be comforting to recall that detailed longitudinal analysis of the behavior of a single solar system was the foundation stone for Kepler's laws, and ultimately Newton's.

The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.

Nobel Prize–winner Herbert Simon, who created the idea of maximizing and satisficing, said that in the end, when you calculate all factors of stress, results, and effort, satisficing is actually the method that maximizes.

In the 1950s the pioneering scholar Herbert Simon paved the way for people like Schwartz by showing that most of the time people are not all that interested in getting the best possible option. Generally, Simon argued, people and organizations lack the time, knowledge, and inclination to seek out “the best” and are surprisingly content with a suboptimal outcome. Maximizing is just too difficult, so we wind up being “satisficers” (a term that combines “satisfy” and “suffice”). We may fantasize about having the best of something, but usually we are happy to have something that’s “good enough.

Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon postulated that people can be divided into two groups: Maximizers and Satisficers. Whether they’re choosing a restaurant, college, or spouse, maximizers are obsessed with always making the very best choice and trying to attain the very fullest happiness. Satisficers are happy with any sufficient option. You’d think Maximizers would be happier, since they spend so much time and energy on making the best possible choice. But they’re not. Even after they make their choice, they agonize that maybe it wasn’t the right one after all. Satisficers, meanwhile, have moved on with their life and are enjoying what they chose. Deciding is progress. Perfect is the enemy of good.

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than the unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals. —Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics

Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

In the past half century, however, an impressive body of formal theory has been erected by mathematical statisticians and economists to help us reason about these matters-without introducing a new kind of logic. The basic idea of this theory is to load all values into a single function, the utility function, in this way finessing the question of how different values are to be compared. The comparison has in effect already been made when it is assumed that a utility has been assigned to each particular state of affairs. This formal theory is called subjective expected utility (SEU) theory. Its construction is one of the impressive intellectual achievements of the first half of the twentieth century. It is an elegant machine for applying reason to problems of choice.

These are the four principal components of the SEU model: a cardinal utility function, an exhaustive set of alternative strategies, a probability distribution of scenarios for the future associated with each strategy, and a policy of maximizing expected utility.

We live in what might be called a nearly empty world-one in which there are millions of variables that in principle could affect each other but that most of the time don't. In gravitational theory everything is pulling at everything else, but some things pull harder than others, either because they're bigger or because they're closer. Perhaps there is actually a very dense network of interconnections in the world, but in most of the situations we face we can detect only a modest number of variables or considerations that dominate. If this factorability is not wholly descriptive of the world we live in today-and I will express some reservations about that-it certainly describes the world in which human rationality evolved: the world of the cavemen's ancestors, and of the cavemen themselves. In that world, very little was happening most of the time, but periodically action had to be taken to deal with hunger, or to flee danger, or to secure protection against the coming winter. Rationality could focus on dealing with one or a few problems at a time, with the expectation that when other problems arose there would be time to deal with those too.

What can we say for and about this behavioral version, this bounded rationality version, of human thinking and problem solving? The first thing we can say is that there is now a tremendous weight of evidence that this theory describes the way people, in fact, make decisions and solve problems. The theory has an increasingly firm empirical base as a description of human behavior. Second, it is a theory that accounts for the fact that creatures stay alive and even thrive, who-however smart they are or think they are-have modest computational abilities in comparison with the complexity of the entire world that surrounds them. It explains how such creatures have survived for at least the millions of years that our species has survived. In a world that is nearly empty, in which not everything is closely connected with everything else, in which problems can be decomposed into their components-in such a world, the kind of rationality I've been describing gets us by.