Sublime

Adam Appich, master of science, is there with several studies that show how legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

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.

When we see the first applicant, we have no information—she’ll always appear to be the best yet. When we see the third applicant, we have no agency—we have to make an offer to the final applicant,

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

System 2) is slow, focused, self-aware, and what most of us consider “thinking.” We can rationally analyze our way through unfamiliar situations and handle complex problems with System 2. Unfortunately, System 2 is woefully limited in how much information it can handle at a time

1. Effective executives know where their time goes.

We are not omniscient, rational optimizers, says Simon. Rather, we are blundering “satisficers,” attempting to meet (satisfy) our needs well enough (sufficiently) before moving on to the next decision.11 We do our best to further our own nearby interests in a rational way, but we can take into account only what we know. We don’t know what others ar

human problem solving, from the most blundering to the most insightful, involves nothing more than varying mixtures of trial and error and selectivity. The selectivity derives from various rules of thumb, or heuristics, that suggest which paths should be tried first and which leads are promising.

as many critics have pointed out—most recently, the computer scientist and musician Jaron Lanier—large collectives are rarely capable of true creativity or innovation. (We have the term “herd mentality” for a reason.)