Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001)

This is my first exposure to "systems thinking" from a member of the generation which kicked that term off, along with its sister term "cybernetics". The book reads not so much as a thesis, but as a way of thinking applied to a variety of closely related systems. He uses his new theory of the artificial to exploring his research on the internal environment of the human brain, and how it makes decisions, as well as the economy, and government.

The book includes a window into the research show more going on in Simon's cohort in the 1960s, from computational brain models such as SOAR, to chess playing bots, to highway planners, to theses on management decision-making. Simon draws on these papers to find the underlying constants that tie the common attributes of the systems together, such as the structure as hierarchical or almost-hierarchical. This is a mix of obvious and misleading. I would say that taking such a fundamental view on systems will give us profound ideas only if we can see them, it will show us obvious ideas which were non-obvious at the time, and will show us gaps in our thought that might be good candidates for exploration. One of these is a learning system which can search a tree of concepts MCTS style but applies an idea learned on one leaf immediately to other leaves which might contain similar ideas. Basically, an MCTS which tries to learn and apply patterns.

I'm really happy I discovered this, because it launched my exploration of design as a field. show less

A clearly argued book which is theoretical enough to have sustained its appeal for almost seventy years now. It's easy to see why it became a classic in the field of administrative theory. In essence this book is about the limits of fully informed and rational decision making and the procedures and customs that organization adopt to deal with these limits. In this fourth edition each chapter is followed by an extensive commentary. Although some of them were interesting, overall I thought show more these commentaries were too long and that they interrupted the original argument too much. show less

The Sciences of the Artificial ("Sciences") is clear and concise. Simon is his usual impressive self. I suppose it needs to be understood that this book, aimed to argue for the existence of a class of science, contains overviews of various computing and psychological concepts. These overviews are dated, of course, and even then not free of typographical errors.

Still, I am enjoying this one very much.

This is a short book containing three lecture-based essays; the first on rational choice theory, the second on social evolution and the third on knowledge in politics. Although the author's learned and logical style makes each essay enjoyable, I still did not find them particularly interesting. The format is simply too short for any powerful arguments. I would recommend the author's longer works instead of this collection.