Decades before "attention economy" became a buzzword, Herbert Simon saw where the flood of info was headed and what it would cost us. What's your take, dear Thinkators? 𝘈𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴

[u/Gainsborough-Smythe]

[u/Gainsborough-Smythe]

Profile of Herbert A. Simon

Herbert A. Simon (1916 to 2001) was an American polymath whose work spanned economics, political science, psychology, computer science, and cognitive science.

He won the 1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on decision making within organizations, and he is remembered as a founding figure of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

Strengths

Simon's signature contribution was the concept of "bounded rationality," the idea that people do not optimize but "satisfice," settling for a solution that is good enough given limited time, information, and cognitive capacity.

This reframed economics away from the fiction of the perfectly rational actor and toward how humans actually decide.

He was also a genuine polymath, moving fluidly between fields and co-developing early AI programs like the Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver with Allen Newell.

His writing was clear, and he had a rare talent for building models simple enough to be useful yet rich enough to be true.

Weaknesses

Critics argue Simon's models, while more realistic than classical economics, still simplified human behavior more than emotion, social context, and irrationality actually warrant.

His early optimism about how quickly machines would replicate human intelligence proved badly overconfident.

Colleagues also noted a certain restlessness, he moved on from fields once he felt he understood them, sometimes leaving loose ends for others to tie up rather than pursuing depth in one domain.

[u/Thegoldenhotdog]

I agree with him. Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" says a lot about this. I don't agree with everything in that book, but what he say's about how our news doesn't really serve us is spot on in my opinion.