Workbook Edits for “Making Good Decisions”: Author Profile: Herbert Simon for Volume 1 – Part I: Our Shared Humanity
For new readers, please read the “Pinned Post” titled Why Use Public Peer-Review to Write a Book? - “See for Yourself”.
For returning readers and subscribers, this post presents the Author Profile for Herbert Simon from the workbook for Vol. 1 – Part I: Our Shared Humanity.
- See below the downloadable pdf file for this two-page section, as well as a summary description of the section.
Volume 1 – Part I: Author Profile: Herbert Simon (1916 - 2001)
- Author profiles use the summary version of the Template for Reading Research Papers (See workbook for Volume 1 – Part V) to present the history, and meaning of the life and work of key authors selected from the more than 140 authors mentioned in Volume 1 – Part I: Our Shared Humanity.
This Author Profile presents the life and work of Herbert Simon (1916 - 2001). Simon’s “Bounded Rationality” moved academic research from “One-Size-Fits-All” decision-making “Tools” such as Kurt Gödel’s logical, thus necessarily tautological, statements derived deductively from inside “Small Worlds” systems defined by axioms, to clinically ambiguous decision-making “Processes” such as Karl Popper’s inductive, thus falsifiable, statements derived from “Large World” observations.
At the beginning of his 2015 book “Simply Rational, Decision Making in the Real World”, Gerd Gigerenzer asks a question about falsifiable inductive observations related to decision-making theories. To paraphrase: Can we find research that measured deviations from using “Small Worlds”, rational, “Expected Utility” decision-making “Tools”, and showed that these deviations, such as using “Large World” heuristics, produced economic losses, lower earnings, higher unhappiness, worse health, damaging beliefs, or shorter life-spans? The short answer at the time - subject to developing observations subject to clinical ambiguity, and contradiction: No.
On the other hand, Dmitry Chernov & Didier Sornette, as seen in Volume 1 – Part I: Section #15, wrote two books that provide an extensive catalog of the negative impacts that come using the “Tools” of the “Small Worlds” to make individual, business, and investment decisions. Warning flags for ignoring “Bounded Rationality”, and mismatched “Ecological Rationality”, as discussed in Volume 1 – Part II, include: “One-size-Fits-All” derived from averages, Scaled-up optimization, Censored and siloed perspectives - thus the absence of “Two-in-One-Mind” thinking, Unchallenged “Assumptions & Hypotheses”, Ideological, axiomatic thinking instead of inductive, real-life observations, Injecting the “Infinite” – such as the traditional presentation of Calculus, to resolve “Finite Game” problems, etc.
Developing…
”CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a business book in three volumes, published serially 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 research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.