Simon's own account of expert intuition diagnoses the Minsky–Papert sterility conjecture as confident judgment in a low-validity environment — a shared epistemic structure, not documented influence

Two vault notes sat unlinked despite a high cosine similarity (0.75): Minsky & Papert's self-flagged "intuitive judgment" that multilayer perceptrons were sterile (claim-perceptrons-multilayer-sterile-was-conjecture) and Simon's satisficing-equals-heuristic-search move (claim-simon-satisficing-and-heuristic-search-same-move). The surface link is the shared word "intuitive." The deeper link, run down across a three-hop chain, is not wordplay: Simon's own cognitive theory supplies a mechanism that diagnoses the conjecture.

Simon held that expert intuition is fast recognition of learned cues within a domain (claim-simon-defines-expert-intuition-as-domain-bound-recognition). Kahneman and Klein's later account of when that recognition is trustworthy adds the scope condition: only in regular, high-feedback environments; elsewhere confident intuition becomes systematic error (claim-kahneman-klein-2009-intuition-reliable-only-in-high-validity-environments). Minsky and Papert's multilayer sterility conjecture is a textbook low-validity case by that standard — an open question on the frontier of a young field, with no trained multilayer counterexample yet in existence and no feedback loop to calibrate confidence against. They satisficed: accepted a good-enough belief ("an important research problem to elucidate or reject") in place of the then-unaffordable cost of proof, in precisely the setting Simon's own framework flags as unreliable. The conjecture stood unrebutted for roughly fifteen years.

The pattern closes on Simon himself. In 1960 he made his own confident, falsified prediction about the unrun future of an adjacent young field — that machines would do any human work within twenty years (claim-simon-1960-predicted-machines-would-match-any-human-work-within-20-years). Same failure class, same author, different target.

Caveat, held deliberately: this is a shared epistemic structure, not documented influence. Simon is not a figure in the perceptron controversy, and nothing here shows Minsky or Papert drew on his theory, or that Simon ever commented on their conjecture. Whether that caveat can be lifted is routed at question-did-simon-comment-on-perceptron-controversy-or-connectionism.