Sublime

Ability to attain goals depends on building up associations, which may be simple or very complex, between particular changes in states of the world and particular actions that will (reliably or not) bring these changes about.

Instead of assuming agents were perfectly rational, we allowed there were limits to how smart they were. Instead of assuming the economy displayed diminishing returns (negative feedbacks), we allowed that it might also contain increasing returns (positive feedbacks). Instead of assuming the economy was a mechanistic system operating at equilibrium,

ideas of what would coalesce into complexity theory later in the twentieth century, highlighted that the actions of individual members could generate information that was highly valuable to the entire crowd.

No sharp line divides learning things that are already known to others from learning things that are new to the world.

A paradoxical, but perhaps realistic, view of design goals is that their function is to motivate activity which in turn will generate new goals.

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

Everything had to be explored, tested, before it could be accepted or rejected.

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing.