Herbert Simon, 1916--2001 (original) (raw)

20 Nov 2024 14:55

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, big picture:
  • 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.]
  • "Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations" [Nobel Prize lecture]
  • Reason in Human Affairs
• Non-technical, HAS on HAS:
  • Models of My Life
  • "Autobiography" for the Nobel Prize
• Non-technical, close-ups:
  • "Organizations and Markets,"Journal of Economic Perspectives 5 (1991):25--44[PDF reprint]
  • The Shape of Automation for Men and Managementa.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.]
  • "The Proverbs of Administration", Public Administration Review 6 (1946): 54--67[PDF reprint]
• Technical, if not exactly big picture then at least wide-ranging albums:
  • Simon Collection at CMU Library
  • Models of Man: Social and Rational: Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting [Paper collection from 1957, containing much of his best and most influential work]
  • Models of Bounded Rationality, vol. III [I can't recommend the first two, simply because I haven't finished reading them yet]
• Technical, close-ups, skew distributions:
  • "On a Class of Skew Distribution Functions",Biometrika 42 (1955): 425--440 [= chapter 9 in Models of Man]
  • Yuji Ijiri and HAS, Skew Distributions and the Sizes of Business Firms
• Technical, close-ups, causality and complexity:
  • "Causal Ordering and Identifiability", in Studies in Econometric Method, 1953 [= chapter 1 in Models of Man; PDF of the 1950 preprint version, as "The Causal Principle and the Identification Problem"]
  • "Spurious Correlation: A Causal Interpretation",Journal of the American Statistical Association 49 (1954): 467--479 [=chapter 2 in Models of Model; PDF reprint]
  • "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]
• Technical, close-ups, bounded rationality:
  • "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice", Quarterly Journal of Economics 69 (1955): 99--118[=chapter 14 of Models of Man; PDF reprint]
  • "Rational Choice and the Structure of the Environment", Psychological Review 63 (1956): 129--138 [=chapter 15 of Models of Man; PDF reprint]
  • "Rationality as Process and as Product of Thought",American Economic Review 68 (1978): 1--16 [JSTOR]
• Technical, close-ups, organizations, markets, economics:
  • An Empirically-based Microeconomics
  • "On the Application of Servomechanism Theory in the Study of Production Control", Econometrica 20 (1952): 247--268 [= chapter 13 of Models of Man]
  • HAS and Ferdinand K. Levy, "A Note on the Cobb-Douglas Production Function", Review of Economic Studies 30 (1963) 93--94 [PDF reprint]
  • James G. March and HAS, Organizations
• Technical, close-ups, artificial intelligence:
  • Allen Newell and Herbert P. Simon, "Current Developments in Complex Information Processing", RAND Corporation report P-850, 1 May 1956 [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
• Technical, close-ups, misc.:
  • "A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism," Science 250(199): 1665--1668 [reprinted in Models of Bounded Rationality vol. III] Recommended, about Simon:
• Edward A. Feigenbaum, "Herbert A. Simon, 1916--2001," Science 291 (2001) 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