The Sciences of the Artificial

The real design problem is not to provide more information to people but to allocate the time they have available for receiving information so that they will get only the information that is most important and relevant to the decisions they will make.

we can often predict behavior from knowledge of the system’s goals and its outer environment, with only minimal assumptions about the inner environment.

equilibrium is only local, and quite inferior to distant equilibria that cannot be reached by the up-hill climb of evolution.

What is striking about these documents is their practical sense and the awareness they exude of the limits of foresight about large human affairs.

Fulfillment of purpose or adaptation to a goal involves a relation among three terms: the purpose or goal, the character of the artifact, and the environment in which the artifact performs.

The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos.

But the remarkable fact was that, when masters and grandmasters were shown other chessboards with the same numbers of pieces arranged at random. their abilities to reconstruct the boards were only marginally better than the duffers’ with the boards from actual games, while the duffers performed as well or poorly as they had before.

proclaimed without any concern

Thus the traditional definition of the professional’s role is highly compatible with bounded rationality, which is most comfortable with problems having clear-cut and limited goals.