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Rationality and the true human condition

The fifth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Ron Sun The notion of rationality is important to many fields in social and behavioral sciences. Herbert Simon’s seminal work on “bounded rationality” and “satisficing” led to broadened conceptions of rationality, which significantly impacted a number of…

John McWhorter: public intellectual par excellence

In a crowded field of public intellectuals, John McWhorter stands head and shoulders above most. He has a genuine commitment to the Socratic method (i.e. intellectual honesty), never peddling an over-rehearsed hardened position that he’s been married to since the year dot. One always feels that he really values the provisionality of intellectual discourse and is always…

David Egan’s last stand

Our great Southern songwriter lays in a recliner, feet propped up into a blanket that covers legs made thin by a cancer whose patience has worn out. Those legs used to amble around one hell of man — a tall, ruggedly handsome man’s man and raconteur gifted in music and conversation. — full article here.…

Walker Percy Wednesday 74

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are. ***** I like your banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carré. It is set down squarely in the midst…

Free on the Inside: Jazz Fest eat your heart out

I’m astonished that the music press, especially the Southern-based press, haven’t given this concert any mention — at least so far as I can determine. It has the most distinguished of lineups one can imagine and is exquisitely performed — Jamie Davis, Scotty Barnhart, Dennis Wilson, Ken Miller, Greg Errico (drummer with The Family Stone!!!!), Wycliffe Gordon, Lady Bianca, Charles McNeal,…

The Mangy Parrot 4

The silliest thing some parents do is to make their son become a lawyer or a priest by brute force, even when he has no vocation for such a career, nor any talent for letters: a baneful process, whose pernicious effects are daily bemoaned when we see all these paper-pushing lawyers, murderous doctors, and ignorant,…

From The Sciences of the Artificial to Cognitive History

The fourth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Subrata Dasgupta It is well known that Herbert Simon was a 20th century scientific polymath who made seminal contributions to the social sciences, behavioral sciences, design theory, computer science, and the philosophy of science (Dasgupta, 2003a, 2003b).…

Happy Birthday Fats

Fats is 88! American Masters is presenting the broadcast premiere of the recent Fats Domino documentary on February 26, his 88th birthday. Fats’ comeback album is really worth a listen, short but very sweet. boogie woogieFats Dominomusicnew orleans