Sublime

Now no one in his right mind will satisfice if he can equally well optimize; no one will settle for good or better if he can have best. But that is not the way the problem usually poses itself in actual design situations.

This view can be extended to all of problem solving—solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

But, contrary to libertarian rhetoric, we are not monads. From birth until death, our ability to reach our goals, even to survive, is tightly linked to our social interactions with others in our society.

Minsky’s theory of intelligence, as expressed in his book The Society of Mind, could be unkindly characterized as “the mind is just one damn thing after another.” The Society of Mind is a laundry list of hundreds of separate ideas, each with its own vignette. The problem with this approach to AI is that it doesn’t work; it’s stamp collecting by

The important lesson I learned from this analysis was that my conclusions depended at least as much on certain assumptions about boundary conditions as on the central assumptions of economic rationality that lie at the core of neoclassical theory. By boundary conditions I mean the assumptions that have to be made about which indirect effects of a

The answer derives from the fact that what is good for groups is not always good for the individuals comprising them. For example, both multicellular organisms and social insect colonies are functionally specialized and hierarchically organized collectives that are highly successful in maintaining and transmitting accumulated knowledge, in the form

But somehow, untutored intuitions about self-regulation without central direction do not carry over to the artificial systems of human society. I retain vivid memories of the astonishment and disbelief expressed by the architecture students to whom I taught urban land economics many years ago when I pointed to medieval cities as marvelously