Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
Per Cosma’s recommendation, I got Gigerenzer et al.’s Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart out of the library, and after slogging through Herb Simon’s Administrative Behavior I’m on to the much more vibrant Simple Heuristics.
First, just a quick note about Simon’s book. I love Simon’s writing style, and having witnessed a public debate with the man during a philosophy class I took at Carnegie Mellon, I can testify that the guy hadn’t lost a step well into his eighties. I’ve now read three of his books, including Administrative Behavior, and AB is the least-well-written of the three. I’m inclined to write that off to the book’s age: Simon wrote it well before he had formulated many of his ideas in cognitive science, and before he apparently had found a voice. After each chapter in Administrative Behavior is a postscript from the Nineties, incorporating 50 years of Simon’s wisdom; the postscripts are by far the best-written parts of the book, and the most profound — from the perspective of someone who’s really intrigued by bounded rationality and artificial intelligence.