Herbert Simon

Polymath of bounded rationality whose concepts recur as diagnostic tools across the vault. "Satisficing" and heuristic search are the same move — good enough under limited computation — and the vault uses them to reframe the perceptron "sterility" conjecture and the combinatorial-explosion critiques of early AI. He is also the vault's stock example of AI overpromising (the 1960 prediction that machines would match any human work within twenty years) and the source of the "expert intuition = domain-bound pattern recognition" line that connects to Kahneman–Klein on high- vs low-validity environments.

References

• claim-simon-satisficing-and-heuristic-search-same-move · claim-simon-1960-predicted-machines-would-match-any-human-work-within-20-years · claim-simon-defines-expert-intuition-as-domain-bound-recognition · claim-kahneman-klein-2009-intuition-reliable-only-in-high-validity-environments
• Captures: 2026-07-11-hop-satisficing-diagnoses-sterility-conjecture, 2026-07-09-hop-lighthill-combinatorial-explosion

Log

• 2026-08-01: Gigerenzer's camp explicitly frames ecological rationality as "directly building on Simon's program of bounded rationality" (Nordli, Todd & Gigerenzer 2017) — Simon is the shared ancestor both the ecological and the Bayesian-rational-analysis camps measure their "bounded/good-enough" language against (claim-gigerenzer-camp-defines-ecological-rationality-as-not-optimization).