p.76 Simon’s bounded rationality (BR), the first scientific
research program (as opposed to a purely philosophical one) to seriously take the cognitive limitations of decision makers
into account, has often been conflated [JLJ - Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more individuals, concepts,
or places, sharing some characteristics of one another, become confused until there seems to be only a single identity —
the differences appear to become lost. ] with his more restricted concept of satisficing - choosing an alternative
that meets or exceeds specified criteria, but that is not guaranteed to be unique or in any sense “the best.”
Proponents of optimization often dismiss bounded rationality out of hand with the following "hallway syllogism"
(as formulated by Bendor 2003: 435, who disagrees with it): bounded rationality "boils down to" satisficing; satisficing
is "simply" a theory of search for alternatives that takes into account the costs of computation. Hence, bounded
rationality is “just a minor tweak” on optimal search theory.
p.77 Almost 20 years after he received the “Nobel Prize in Economic
Science,” Simon still wondered why his call for realism in the study of decision making, whether human, animal, or artificial,
was received with “something less than unbounded enthusiasm,” if not “largely ignored as irrelevant for
economics (and as probably wrong) for many years” (Simon 1997a: 269).
p.77 Much of Simon’s work in economics was concerned with unearthing
the weaknesses of mainstream theory
p.78 In The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon
([1969] 1996a) described an ant negotiating difficult terrain. Its behavior appears complex, but the mechanisms
underlying it presumably are not: the ant simply responds to the environmental cues it happens to encounter.
p.79 The fitness of an organism depends on how effectively it makes
decisions in an uncertain and changing environment
p.80 For Simon (1983: 7), reason is entirely instrumental: “It cannot
tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there.”
p.82 Oster and Wilson put it this way: Rather than a grand scheme for predicting
the course of natural selection, optimization theory constitutes no more than a tactical tool for making educated
guesses about evolutionary trends.
