Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon (1916–2001) won the Nobel Prize in Economics for a simple observation: humans don’t optimize, they satisfice. We don’t find the best option; we find one that’s good enough and stop searching.

This wasn’t a flaw to correct but a necessary adaptation. Bounded rationality recognizes that decision-makers have limited information, limited computation, and limited time. The perfectly rational agent of economic theory is a fiction; real agents use heuristics, rules of thumb, and shortcuts.

Simon’s work spanned economics, psychology, artificial intelligence, and organizational theory. His operational definitions — terms that cash out in procedures and constraints — model the engineer’s virtue: make assumptions realistic enough to run.

Related: [[satisficing]], [[chunking]], [[models]], [[constraints]]