#herbert simon

[eelhound]

"How can the worst-designed systems [in nature] be the most durable?

The answer, rather counterintuitively, is that they are durable because they are not optimised. An optimised design is one that has been tuned precisely as possible to its current conditions. Every component fits perfectly to its present demands. Nothing is wasted, nor is anything redundant. The system performs beautifully under exactly the conditions for which it was optimised.

What happens when the conditions change?

The more precisely a system is tuned to one environment, the greater the chance that it will fail catastrophically when that environment changes. Environments change all the time, so this is not a hypothetical concern. The climate changes, competitors arrive, the pH of the environment changes, a new virus turns up, food sources disappear, your host takes an antibiotic. The one thing you can say for sure about present conditions is that they will not last.

So while the giraffe's laryngeal nerve is insane, the same basic layout works in a fish, a frog, a lizard, a mouse, an elephant, and a whale. It works across every body plan, every neck length, every thoracic arrangement that vertebrates have ever produced. An optimised routing that always took the shortest path for the specific neck length of the specific animal, would need to be re-engineered every time the body plan changed. What looks like a stupid design today is a design that hasn't broken when other things changed.

Which brings me to the giant panda, an animal that is exquisitely adapted to its niche, eating almost exclusively bamboo, employing a modified wrist bone to grip its stems, digesting them with a gut that is still essentially the gut of a carnivore, processing its food so inefficiently that it must eat for 14 hours a day. The panda, an epitome of specialisation, is also, in ecological terms, a dead animal walking. If bamboo were to disappear, thanks to deforestation, climate change, or disease, the panda ends up with nothing. Its optimisation is its obituary.

The contrast is the rat. The brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, not specialised for anything in particular, eats whatever is available, lives wherever it finds itself. It has no remarkable adaptations, no precise fit to any specific niche. It is a generalist that is mediocre at 100 different things, and not brilliant at any. The rat is everywhere and will be here long after the panda is a memory. The rat is good enough.

In 1956, the economist Herbert Simon coined the word 'satisficing,' a portmanteau of 'satisfy' and 'suffice,' to describe how real decision-makers operate. Classical economics assumes that rational agents always optimise. They survey the available options, compute the expected value of each, and select the very best one. Simon pointed out that this is quite insane. No real agent has the time, the information, or the computational power to optimise to that degree. What real agents do is set a threshold that we might call 'good enough,' and pick the first option that makes it over that threshold.

Simon won a Nobel Prize for his observation, and I’m going to suggest that he had to. The idea that 'good enough' is a legitimate strategy, and not a failure to try hard enough, not a compromise, nor is it laziness, but a defensible, mathematically sound approach to operating in a complex world was alien to the intellectual culture of the 20th century. It took a Nobel prize to make this idea respectable. Ironically, biology has been employing this principle for four and a half billion years before Herbert Simon figured out a name for it. I would assert that every organism that has ever lived is a satisficer. Few, if any, have ever optimised, because optimisation requires the kind of global knowledge that no real system, biological, economic, or personal, has ever possessed...

What lasts is not what’s best. What lasts is the thing that is most viable across the widest possible suite of conditions, for the longest period of time. 'The best', and 'the most durable' are not the same, and in fact, I would say they are in tension with one another. The more finely you tune a system to current conditions, the more fragile you make it. The more you aim for the optimal, the more dependent you become on the world being unchanged. And it never will.

Good enough is not a consolation prize, nor a medal for participation. Good enough is what all the long-lived things have in common.

The rest is palaeontology."

- James McInerney, from "Good Enough." James McInerney Substack, 9 June 2026.

[nofatclips]

The 4 things it takes to be an expert (not just 10000 hours):

Repeated attempts with feedback

A valid environment

Timely feedback

Don’t get too comfortable

[noosphe-re]

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.

Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

[thephilosophyofwho]

One finds limits by pushing them.

-Herbert Simon

[luminousradar]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/opinion/decision-making-herbert-simon.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness

[retrocompmx]

Efemérides computacional: Un 15 de junio de 1916, nace Herbert Simon, pionero de la IA

Una 15 de junio de 1916 nace Herbert A. Simon, un genio #Polímata pionero de la #inteligenciaartificial con The Logic Theorist. Ganó un Nobel por su "racionalidad limitada". Descubre al visionario en #retrocomputingmx #IA #historiadelacomputación

Herbert Simon y la semilla de la IA

La historia de un pensador extraordinario que no solo fue pionero en la Inteligencia Artificial, Herbert Simon y la semilla de la IA

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section I, Ch. 3 "Language and Knowledge in Everyday Life"

summary of "The Social Construction of Reality" by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn't link to individual posts correctly

I. Human expressivity can be concretized/objectified ("objectivation") and therefore the subjective can be made part of a shared objective reality.

II. The reality of everyday life is filled with, and possible because of, these "objectivations."

III. A "sign" is a special case of objectivation, in that it is explicitly intended to serve as an index of subjective meaning.

IV. Signs are clustered in systems, and as objectivations have a property of "detachibility" from the here-and-now; "a dance is less a part of the dancer than a snarl is a part of the snarler."

V. Spoken language i.e. vocal signs is the most important sign system compared to eg. gesture, movement, artifact, etc; it is language because of detachibility

VI. The detachibility of language lies in its ability to communicate meaning beyond the subjective here-and-now.

VII. Languge also possesses a quality of rapid reciprocity in face-to-face interaction; subjectivity can be synchronized. I also hear myself; my subjectivity becomes more accessible to me in conversation. "Men must talk about themselves until they know themselves."

VIII. Language has its origins in, and mainly references, shared objective reality. It is external and coercive; it imposes patterns in order to be successful as communication; it anonymizes as it becomes more broadly applicable.

IX. Language also integrates different aspects of everyday life into a more meaningful whole - "here and now" can also be "this and that," "then and now", etc.

X. Language can integrate non-reality as well, eg describing a dream embeds a disjoint "reality" into everyday reality.

XI. A theme that spans realities in this way can b defined as a "symbol." The linguistic mode that manifests these symbols is "symbolic language," characterized by maximal detachment from everyday reality. Religion, philosophy, art, science are examples of such symbolic languages/symbol systems, and are essential constituents of everyday life.

XII. The structure and usage oflanguge defines (precisely or loosely) "zones of meaning" or "semantic fields" eg the tu/vous dichotomy in French defines zones of social intimacy, or occupational languages (medicine, engineering, etc) define their own zones, etc. Semantic fields represent stocks of social knowledge.

XIII. Semantic fields representing social relational knowledge allow "placement" i.e. social role definition

XIV. Since much of everyday life is dominated by the "pragmatic motive", much of social knowledge consists of "recipes" (procedures, heuristics, algorithms) for resolving or addressing social problems/situations.

XV. Social knowledge is differentiated by degree of familiarity: that which I do more, I understand more fully/embody the semantic field more fully.

XVI. These semantic fields are taken as "valid until further notice" i.e. until they cannot provide a routine to handle a given situation.

XVII. The semantic fields I embody - the fraction of the social stock of knowledge that I possess - is a lucid zone behind which there is a background of darkness, that which I do not and in many cases cannot know.

XVIII. Semantic fields are also structured by relevance; what is and is not relevant for me overlaps, or doesn't, with other folks relevant semantic fields; relevance is also contextual.

XIX. Semantic fields are also unevenly distributed: that which I know, others may not, and vice-versa - thus knowledge of the distribution of knowledge is an important part of social knowledge.

----

Notes:

re: III and XI - discussion of signs/symbols may be borrowing from semiotic theory here, but usage seems different from what I recall of my (limited) reading

re: VII - echoes of Paul Graham on essay-writing - expression is creation/crystallization/objectification

re: IX - language flattens the past and brings it into the present - the "depth" of social reality/semantic fields is always apprehended in the present - holograms on the surface of a black hole, an infinitely small layer of present knowledge that is refreshed by objective artifacts - including people - but has no existence outside of now

re: XII - semantic field has analogy to electrical/magnetic/gravitational fields of physics? it stores… something, it grows and shrinks, it can dissipate, it is carried in a medium, etc…

re: XIV, XV - Herbert Simon - interfaces - abstraction of knowledge: i make a phone call but do not need to know how phone system works - Sherlock Holmes brain-attic analogy

Also re: XV - increasing density of knowledge means more need for abstraction/interfaces that "hide" that complexity - there is only so much a person can know, the more complex the whole the less each person can embody ("the machine stops" as a limiting case)

re: XVI - semantic fields can fail OR be contradictory - cognitive dissonance - pernicious social issues as cultural cognitive dissonance eg abortion, gun control - ripe fields of exploitation for political extremists BECAUSE they are complexities that have not been reduced - energy minimization preferred, "answers" needed - the dialectic, thesis and antithesis without (yet) synthesis

[linusjf]

Herbert Simon: Poverty of attention

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” —Herbert Simon.

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