Volume 2 – Handbook #I: Authors Profiles – Herbert Simon (1916 – 2001)
For new readers, please read the “Pinned Post” at the top of this Substack’s Home Page, and titled Why Use Public Peer-Review to Write a Book? - “See for Yourself”.
For returning readers & subscribers, this post presents the second draft of an Author Profile about Herbert Simon (1916 – 2001)
Herbert Simon connected dots that seemed far apart at the time. His academic interests combined psychology and mathematics. He understood, and connected the empirical ambiguity of decision-making in the “Large World” as well as the modeling “Tools” of the “Small Worlds”.
He started his work with the idea that he could bring the precision of mathematics. However, the radical uncertainty that arises from the uniqueness of individuals made him change direction. He continued his work with the idea that he could bring the accuracy of human heuristics to computers, in the form of artificial intelligence (AI).
In his 2022 book “How to Stay Smart in a Smart World: Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms”, Gerd Gigerenzer explains that “For Simon, AI meant teaching computers how human experts solve a problem”, Gigerenzer calls Simon’s human-to-computer perspective “Psychological AI” to contrast it with “Machine Learning/Automated Decision-Making”, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), where AI has no connection with human intelligence as we know it.
While Simon tried to apply “Psychological AI” to problems from the “Small Worlds”, Gigerenzer extended its development and application to problems in the “Large World”. ML optimizers may beat heuristics in the presence of risk, but heuristics will likely beat ML optimizers in the presence of uncertainty.
See link to the pdf file of this Author Profile below:
“CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a book in three volumes, published at the rate of one two-pages section per day on Substack for public peer-review. The book connects the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, & continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, & Statistics (i.e. AI/ML/LLM) research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.