Herbert Simon, 1916--2001

22 Jun 2023 20:57

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American polymath, sadly deceased after an extremely long and productive career. Formally educated in political science and administration, he won the Nobel prize in economics (modestly, he said he was quite surprised by this), and helped found AI (though he thought "complex information processing" a better name at the time), cognitive science and computer science (in which he won the Turing Award). He once explained this range of interests and contributions to a student this way: "I am a monomaniac. What I am a monomaniac about is decision-making."

Influences: Logical positivism. Bertrand Russell. Mathematical logic. Jorge Luis Borges. Social democracy. W. Ross Ashby.

Leading notions: Choice and decision-making. Search. Satisficing. Bounded rationality. Design as a decision process. Science of design. "Sciences of the artificial". "The artifact as interface". "Physical symbol systems". Complexity. Simulation as a source of knowledge.

Recommended, by Simon:
• Non-technical:
  • The Sciences of the Artificial [The first edition, in its brevity (c. 120 pages), programmatic boldness and ability to make things click, really does resemble the Discourse on Method, the Treatise for the Emendation of the Intellect and other great programmatic works of the age of reason. The third and last (1996) edition is a hundred pages longer, and so the impact is somewhat diluted, but it's still One of Those Books Everyone Ought to Read. Review in process.]
  • Models of My Life [Autobiography]
  • "Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations" [Nobel Prize lecture]
  • Reason in Human Affairs
  • The Shape of Automation for Men and Management a.k.a. The New Science of Management Decisions [From the early 1960s; he was wrong about the long-term impact of computerization, but everyone was, and his errors are still instructive.]
  • "Autobiography" for the Nobel Prize
• Technical:
  • Simon Collection at CMU Library
  • Yuji Ijiri and HAS, Skew Distributions and the Sizes of Business Firms [See remarks under Power Laws.]
  • James G. March and HAS, Organizations
  • "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice", Quarterly Journal of Economics 69 (1955): 99--118 [PDF reprint]
  • "On a Class of Skew Distribution Functions", Biometrika 42 (1955): 425--440 [JSTOR]
  • An Empirically-based Microeconomics
  • "A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism," Science 250 (199): 1665--1668, reprinted in Models of Bounded Rationality, vol. III
  • Models of Bounded Rationality, vol. III [I can't recommend the first two, simply because I haven't finished reading them yet]
  • Models of Man [Paper collection from 1957. Contains the fundamental papers on bounded rationality, his classic work on causal ordering and identifiability, and "On a Class of Skew Distribution Functions", which is still more advanced than much of the literature on power-law distributions.]
  • "Causal Ordering and Identifiability", in Studies in Econometric Method, 1953; reprinted as chapter 1 in Models of Man [PDF of the 1950 preprint version, as "The Causal Principle and the Identification Problem"]
  • "Near Decomposability and Complexity: How a Mind Resides in a Brain," in Harold Morowitz and Jerome Singer (eds.), The Mind, the Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1995), pp. 25--43 [PDF reprint]
  • "Organizations and Markets," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5 (1991):25--44 [PDF reprint]
  • "The Proverbs of Administration", Public Administration Review 6 (1946): 54--67 [JSTOR; PDF reprint]
  • "Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment", Psychological Review 63 (1956): 129--138 [PDF reprint]
  • "Rationality as Process and as Product of Thought", American Economic Review 68 (1978): 1--16 [JSTOR]
  • "Spurious Correlation: A Causal Interpretation", Journal of the American Statistical Association 49 (1954): 467-479 [PDF reprint]
  • "The Structure of Ill-Structured Problems", Artificial Intelligence 4 (1973): 181--201
  • Alonso H. Vera and HAS, "Situated Action: A Symbolic Interpretation," Cognitive Science 17 (1993): 7--48

Recommended, about Simon:
• Edward A. Feigenbaum, "Herbert A. Simon, 1916--2001," Science 291 2107 [Obituary; source of the "monomaniac" quote above]
• Howard Gardner, The Mind's New Science
• Ariel Rubinstein, Modeling Bounded Rationality [Includes commentary by Simon, and rebuttal by Rubinstein. Review: O docta simplicitas!]

To read:
• Augier and March (eds.), Models of a Man: Essays in Memory of Herbert A. Simon
• Jonathan Bendor, "Herbert A. Simon: Political Scientist", Annual Review of Political Science 6 (2003): 433--471
• Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America
• K. A. Ericsson and H. A. Simon, Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data
• Kotovsky and Klahr (eds.), Complex Informatin Processing: The Impact of Herbert A. Simon
• Massimo Negrotti, The theory of the Artificial
• Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, Human Problem Solving
• Herbert Simon
  • Administrative Behavior, 4th ed.
  • Models of Bounded Rationality vol. I and II
  • Models of Discovery: and Other Topics in the Methods of Science
  • Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of the Creative Process with P. Langley, G. L. Bradshaw and J. Zytkow