Freely available from Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory — by Nick Haslam.
From Bounded Rationality to Expertise
The ninth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.
Fernand Gobet
Introduction
Historically, a pervasive assumption in the social sciences, in particular economics, is that humans are perfect rational agents. Having full access to information and enjoying unlimited computational resources, they maximise utility when making decisions. As is well known, Herbert A. Simon rejected this assumption, calling it a “fantasy”, for two main reasons. First, the complexity of the environment makes it impossible for humans to have full access to information. Second, a number of important restrictions impede the human cognitive system, such as limited attention and slow learning rates. Therefore, humans display only a bounded rationality and must satisfice – i.e. make decisions that are good enough, but not necessarily optimal.
Research into expertise has contributed to the question of rationality in two important ways. First, to what extent can some of the very best amongst us – super experts – approximate full rationality? Second, by what means do experts, at least in part, circumvent the constraints imposed by bounded rationality?
This chapter takes the shape of a fugue, with the themes of bounded rationality and expertise first played in the background of personal recollections, and then elaborated with a more formal survey of Simon’s research into expertise. The themes are played a third and final time with a discussion of the heuristics (rules of thumb) proposed by Simon for having a successful career in science.
Becoming an expert: A personal recollection
My collaboration with Herbert A. Simon lasted over 10 years, including 6 years spent at Carnegie Mellon. While I was working on my PhD thesis on chess players’ memory, I secured a research fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to work with him. The qualifications I listed in my introductory letter to Simon were rather limited: a first degree in psychology and the title of International Chess Master. Simon, who probably saw an opportunity to reactivate research he carried out on chess expertise in the sixties and seventies (see below), but which had been dormant since, accepted to host me.
Meeting the man
I can still recall our first meeting on a beautiful morning in January 1990. His office was welcoming, but also rather disorganised, with stacks of papers and books hiding his desk. The meeting was short but cordial, and Simon gave me advice about life and housing in Pittsburgh, and briefly talked about the projects he was currently involved in.
The second meeting was my first real scientific discussion with Simon. It was actually a shock. In a polite and friendly way, Simon demolished the research line I had in mind for my PhD. The idea was to elicit a chess grandmaster’s knowledge about a small and specific domain (Rook + pawn endgames), and to build a program implementing this knowledge. The aim, inspired by research on expert systems, was to compare the amount of procedural (knowing how) and declarative knowledge (knowing what). Simon found that the project was not realistic enough (“A player like Kasparov will give you lectures on Rook endgames for several days; what are you going to do with all these data?”). In addition, he thought that the project would dovetail better with the research of his colleague John Anderson. I can still feel the panic that invaded me when he told me this, as it was an invitation to sever collaboration before the end of the first meeting! In the discussion that followed, he made it clear that he would prefer a project directly linked to the “chunking theory” he had developed with Chase in the seventies to account for chess expertise. This influential theory, and in particular the computer model MAPP (Memory-Aided Pattern Perceiver) that implemented it in part, had been severely criticised, and Simon wanted to improve on it. Thus my first lesson was that Simon, while open to other ideas, was very selective about the research lines he invested time in, and made sure that they addressed his central interests.
Conceptions of Reinhart Koselleck’s Theory of Historical Time in the Thinking of Michael Oakeshott
New article in the History of European Ideas
Walker Percy Wednesday 79
At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink.
*****
Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion things. But what to do?
The empty tape was spinning past the tape head.
*****
Christ, here’s my discovery. You have got hold of the wrong absolutes and infinities. God as absolute? God as infinity? I don’t even understand the words. I’ll tell you what’s absolute and infinite. Loving a woman. But how would you know? You see, your church knows what it’s doing: rule out one absolute so you have to look for another.
Do you know what it’s like to be a self-centered not unhappy man who leads a tolerable finite life, works, eats, drinks, hunts, sleeps, then one fine day discovers that the great starry heavens have opened to him and that his heart is bursting with it. It? She. Her. Woman. Not a category, not a sex, not one of two sexes, a human female creature, but an infinity. What else is infinity but a woman become meat and drink to you, life and your heart’s own music, the air you breathe? Just to be near her is to live and have your soul’s own self. Just to open your mouth on the skin of her back. What joy just to wake up with her beside you in the morning. I didn’t know there was such happiness.
*****
Yes, but at midnight all cats are black, so what difference does anything make? It does make a difference? What? You opened your mouth and then thought better of it—
But don’t you see. I had to find out. There I was in early middle age and I couldn’t answer the most fundamental question of all. What question? This: Are people as nice as they make out and in fact appear to be, or is it all buggery once the door is closed?
So I meant to find out once and for all. There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.
Social Cognition, Artefacts, and Stigmergy Revisited: Concepts of Coordination
Here’s an extract from the fifth article by Tarja Susi from this special Human-Human Stigmergy issue
Some years ago Susi and Ziemke (2001) made a comparative analysis of social/situated theories of cognition (activity theory, situated action, and distributed cognition) and stigmergy, discussing the coordination paradox, visible in both social insects and human activities. The key elements compared were agents, environment, and artefacts, and the collaborative activity emerging from their interaction. The conclusion made back then was that the considered theories and stigmergy do have some similarities, and that stigmergy could be a common denominator. However, while stigmergy, as a general principle, provides a valuable explanation to the coordination paradox (Theraulaz and Bonabeau, 1999), it may be limited in providing rich descriptions of how seemingly individual activities sum up to coordinated human activity. Hence, the aim of this paper is to discuss some concepts of coordination originating from different areas, and to relate them to stigmergy, which are discussed in the context of a case study at a workplace where most tasks are distributed and individually performed, but result in well organised and coordinated activities at the collective level.
Regarding the issue of defining stigmergy, many definitions are considered vague and too general and many papers on stigmergy are criticised for leading their readers to “believe that it is a simple phenomenon that can be easily dismissed as an environment mediated, and indirect communication mechanism” (Dipple, Raymond and Docherty, 2014, 2014, p. 90; see also, e.g., Heylighen, 2011-12; Huang, Ren and Jin, 2008). However, considering, e.g., Dipple et al.’s (2014) general theory of stigmergy, the concept of stigmergy is anything but simple; based on a thorough review of previous research, and by addressing the “what, how, why, where and when” of stigmergy, they constructed a holistic, macro-level general model thereof. Another example is Huang et al. (2008) who constructed a sign-based model of stigmergy (SBMS), a unified model that places “sign” at its core. The view on stigmergy adopted here is based on these two theories. Dipple et al. (2014) consider different concepts of stigmergy, which includes mechanisms (qualitative/quantitative) distinctions (marker-based/sematectonic), and varieties (four possible combinations of qualitative/quantitative and marker-based/sematectonic). The variety considered here is qualitative marker-based, according to which “the intentional marker is a sign left as a signal that means something to others in its single form […] that facilitates coordination” (Dipple et al., 2014, p. 13). Huang et al. (2008) provide an elaborated description of sign, which is considered to have a content that is an agent’s behaviour or the product of an agent’s activities, is carried by the environment, and can be sensed or observed, and interpreted by other agents. Importantly, these theories consider stigmergy in human activities, which allows us to include a cognitive perspective on agents.
In Susi and Ziemke (2001) it was argued that despite the difference in complexity between social insects and humans, the principles of coordination by use of artefacts can be applied to human activity in order to explain and understand the coordination paradox. Whether stigmergy in fact is applicable on human activity or not, has already been discussed in many papers (e.g., Christensen, 2013; Parunak, 2006; Dipple, Raymond and Docherty, 2014) and the issue will not be re-iterated here. Instead it is assumed that a lot of human activities are stigmergic. After all, as Parunak (2006) states, stigmergy is ubiquitous in human interactions and it “would be more difficult to show a functioning human institution that is not stigmergic, than it is to find examples of human stigmergy” (ibid.). While stigmergy previously has attracted perhaps most interest in areas like Artificial Life (Bonabeau, 1999) and Multi-Agent Systems (Omicini, Ricci and Viroli, 2008), it has also been applied on animals with known cognitive capacities and it is argued to provide a powerful metaphor for human interactions (Marsh and Onof, 2008; Parunak, 2006). Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of ant-like stigmergy, and to include cognizant agents, the concept of stigmergy has also been expanded to explicitly encompass a cognitively oriented perspective, as seen, e.g., in frameworks on stigmergic cognition (Marsh and Onof, 2008) and cognitive stigmergy (Lewis, 2013; Ricci, Omicini, Viroli, Gardelli and Oliva, 2007).
Cognitive stigmergy is said to preserve the benefits of “ant-biased” stigmergy of the multi-agent systems field, but also to “promote the full exploitation of the cognitive abilities of agents and of the environment articulation in artifacts in the stigmergic process” (Ricci et al., 2007, p. 138). Another example is Parunak’s (2006) schema for analysis of human-human stigmergy, which includes four varieties of stigmergy based on a binary distinction between marker-based/sematectonic stigmergy, and qualitative/quantitative stigmergy. The schema is then applied to a number of common human activities which demonstrates their stigmergic nature. Stigmergy is also being increasingly applied in various domains concerned with human activities. Some examples are team cognition (Espinosa, Lerch and Kraut, 2002), team work practices (Christensen, 2013), embodied cognition (Dawson, 2014), information systems and open source software development (Bolici, Howison and Crowston, 2009; Howison, Østerlund, Crowston and Bolici, 2012; Marsden, 2013), online creative communities (Secretan, 2013), and systems security (Lugosky and Dove, 2011).
There is vast number of studies on collaboration, cooperation, and coordination of human activities, but few of them have embraced stigmergy as an explanatory concept. Besides stigmergy there are also other concepts and mechanisms for explaining coordination of human activities, but comparisons are scarce. An exception is Christensen (2013) who compared stigmergy, articulation work, awareness, and feedthrough. In his conclusion none of the mentioned concepts are interchangeable with stigmergy, but that they complement each other. Another analysis was made by Bolici et al. (2009), who compared stigmergy, boundary objects, field of work, trading zones, and community of practice. Some of the concepts are similar or clearly related to each other, but as noted by Howison, Østerlund, Crowston and Bolici (2012), “they don’t take each other’s contribution into account” (referring to implicit coordination and stigmergy). The focus of this paper is stigmergy and a few concepts that are, or can be, related to coordination in human activities, used foremost in cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work. The concepts discussed here are articulation work and coordination mechanisms (Schmidt and Simone, 1996), triggers and placeholders (Dix et al., 2004, and entry points (Kirsh, 2001) (concepts like boundary objects and trading zones, which were compared by Bolici et al., 2009, are not included since they concern structures for coordination between different communities, while the discussion here considers coordination within a community). These concepts do not seem to have been previously compared and related to stigmergy, although three of the concepts (triggers, placeholders, entry points) have been combined as a means for understanding the role of artefacts in social interactions (Susi, 2005). Some of the concepts were originally formulated with regard to individual activities, but the discussion will consider their possible role in coordinating activities on a collective level. For the sake of clarity, the term coordination mechanism, as used in the field of computer-supported cooperative work, will be denoted “coordination mechanisms (CMs)” to distinguish it from stigmergic coordination mechanisms.
The rest of this paper is organised as follows. The next section describes a case study in a work place, which is then used through out the paper to exemplify different concepts, and discusses articulation work and coordination mechanisms. Section three discusses the role of environmental resources in coordination, as seen in the concepts of triggers, placeholders, and entry points. The discussion in these sections is also related to stigmergy. Section four provides an overview of the coordination concepts discussed in previous sections and considers whether the work place indeed is a stigmergic systems. The last section provides a summary and conclusions.
Methodological Individualism, Structural Constraints, and Social Complexity
In press: bumper themed issue guest edited by the very excellent Francesco Di Iorio
1. DI IORIO, Francesco: “Introduction: Methodological Individualism, Structural Constraints, and Social Complexity”
2. NADEAU: Robert: “Cultural Evolution, Group Selection, and Methodological Individualism”
3. ANTISERI, Dario: “Social research between the Use and Abuse of Reason”
4. PETITOT, Jean: “Complex Methodological Individualism”
5. OLIVERIO, Albertina: “The opposition between individual autonomy and social determinism: a controversy by now settled? Proposals and approaches of social research”
6. HERITIER, Paolo: “World 0. Toward an anthropological and aesthetic theory of complex methodological individualism. Between Popper and Dupuy”
7. BOETTKE, Peter and VEETIL, Vipin: “Models of Human Action”
8. DI NUOSCIO, Enzo: “Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Hayek: Two Parallel Theories”
9. CAMPAGNOLO, Gilles: “The Identity of the economic Agent -– seen from a Mengerian point of view in a philosophical and historical context”
10. BIRNER, Jack: “Metaphysical models of man in economics”
11. BRONNER, Gérald: “Cognitive Biases: Between Nature and Culture”
12. CUBEDDU, Raimondo: “Time, Knowledge, and Spontaneous Order”
13. DUMOUCHEL, Paul: “States, Statistical Groups, Individuals, and Other Groups”
Vinyl Crap
Vinyl Tap is the laziest, smuggest, factually inaccurate, tenuous and gratuitous name dropping of an excuse for a programme around. Not to mention (as others have pointed out), sprinkled with “double-dipping.” Furthermore two (used to be three) heads of the same family are in the publicly funded radio trough. Glad others see through this phoniness — see Aaron Hartling’s article CBC, please fire Randy Bachman: A passionate plea, from a humble music fan. Per capita Canada is blessed with a disproportionate number of talented musicians so having a format with say grandees of the calibre such Neil Young and Robbie Robertson doing a monthly show alternating with the younger Win Butler and Régine Chassagne (Arcade Fire) doing another, would be infinitely more satisfying. The former are genuinely distinguished, the latter are plugged into what’s happening now but still with a firm hand of the pulse that is the New Orleans tradition. If you want to hear deeply knowledgeable and modest guys talking about music, then listen to Holger Petersen, Bob Porter, Alice Cooper and Ronnie Wood. My previous thoughts on the wonderful Holger here. Harry Enfield — you were prescient in picking a tune that so captured FM schlock.
California Dreamin’
Here are two very different superb interpretations — the first by Baby Huey; the second by Bobby Womack. These guys so easily and classily rework a classic song squeezing out new nuances. Isaac Hayes and Rod Stewart also had this ability, something that most covers these days fail to do. Both BW and IH reinterpret Bacharach & David compositions which somehow work brilliantly in a soul vein — maybe because it is soul, Forest Hills/Brill soul.
Andy Capp
It now takes three (so credited) to come up with something that Reg Smythe on his own would have rejected as feeble. The Mirror should have let it be and just recycled 40 years worth of material. Here is the best article I’ve found on the Smythe/Capp story: Cigarettes and Alcohol: Andy Capp by Paul Slade.
“[Smythe], does not own the copyright in the cartoon strip,” Rule writes. “He signed it over to the Daily Mirror when he first started drawing Andy”.
Well that explains the dumb perpetuation of the franchise. They have watered down our favorite good-for-nothing slacker, boozer, smoker, bird fancier (feathered and floozy), track man (whippets and the ponies), snooker and darts player, debt dodger, brawler, and moocher.
“Flo is the responsible one,” Hiley agrees. “She knows what should be done and tries to do it. Whereas, he knows what should be done and tries to avoid it. Like a lot of couples all of us know, it’s difficult to figure out why it works, but it does work. They seem to take refuge in each other for some reason. She needs a man, and he needs someone to rescue him when he needs rescuing.” In one sense, Andy rescues Flo too – if only from boredom.
Yes, the domestic violence was not funny (it nevertheless reflected a certain sub-socio-economic class not dissimilar to the kitchen sink realism films of the day) — but why get rid of his dangling fag? Smythe equivocates:
Turning to his own decision to give up the weed, Smythe adds: “I doubt Andy would have stopped on his own.” Health groups such as ASH (Action on Smoking & Health) declared themselves delighted at the move, but Smythe was quick to reassure fans that all Andy’s other bad habits remained firmly in place. (85)
A year later, plans for the statue were shelved. “Beer-swilling, chain-smoking womaniser Andy Capp is thought by some to be politically incorrect in this day and age,” the Hartlepool Mail explained. (91)
Now there’s a surprise!! The statue did eventually see the light of day. Fortunately it didn’t offend the mind’s eye as Ignatius’ statue does in New Orleans, who looks more like a well-upholstered Lee Van Cleef.
I suspect that the Andy Capp memorabilia market is quite firm. I did manage to find a t-shirt with fag but with no pint.
McGeachy splits his analysis into two chapters, tackling first Andy the Sinner and then Andy the Saint. “Andy enjoys his sins, and doesn’t intend to change,” he writes in the first of these. “This does not mean, of course, that Andy doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong. If that were so, he would be a purely amoral being, like the beasts of the field, and his behaviour excusable on that basis. But, more important, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. Stolen melons are sweeter. For sin to amount to anything, it has to be deliberate.”
Hiley made a similar point when I asked him how far Andy could be allowed to reform without losing his soul. “It’s rather like those little cartoon figures indicating people’s conscience that always pop up – there’s a devil on one side and an angel on the other,” he says. “We want Andy Capp to be the devil. We don’t want him to suddenly put wings on and be the angel on the other side. Somebody else can do that job.”
McGeachy turns next to Andy the Saint. “Good or bad, there are few men who can attack life with genuine joy, live it for its own sake, and come off a winner,” he writes. “There is Andy, philosophically and theologically crying both to God and to man, ‘Leave me alone!’ Let me survive in the least noticeable kind of way. I don’t ask to be famous. Don’t try to sell me a Calvinist work ethic. Don’t expect me to be an evangelist or a change-agent or anything else that is my neighbour’s. Just leave me alone!” A little later, he adds: “There is a kind of celebration about Andy, a sacramental view of life that views it as a gift not to be tampered with.”
But transforming the strip into a soapbox, he believed, was not the answer. “I try never to draw things about which I am serious,” he tells Lilley. “As far as I am concerned, passion and humour are bad mixers. Maybe it’s just me, but I believe things are only funny if they’re said in fun. I never try to teach lessons in my cartoons.” (70)
Yes Reg, that’s what made you such a great artist. Aside from the smoking issue, you tried to maintain the integrity of your creation.
Sadly, back in 1988, not enough viewers agreed. Despite being launched with the fanfare of a TV Times cover, the show lost about a third of its viewers during the six-week run, and was never granted the second series everyone involved had hoped for. “I loved doing it so much,” Bolam says. “I was really looking forward to doing the next series.”
What no-one could agree on in the post-mortems was whether the series’ mistake has been making Andy too nasty or not nearly nasty enough.
It’s always dumb transposing something from one modality to another. The audience knew full well that it was a mistake. I recall that it was so flat and disappointing. Think A Confederacy of Dunces . . .
Simon’s (Lost?) Legacy in Agent-Based Computational Economics
The eighth in a series of excerpts from Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon.
Marco Castellani and Marco Novarese
In 1960 Herbert Simon proposed the use of computer simulations in order to enrich and improve economic modelling (Clarkson and Simon, 1960). Computer science was among the many fields to which he made contributions. Therefore, his interest in computer simulations should not be surprising. Simon is often quoted in the agent-based simulation literature, where bounded rationality is fully recognised and used as a starting point. And yet Simon’s approach to simulation seems to be quite neglected: there are very few citations to Clarkson and Simon’s paper. And a specialized journal such as JASSS never quotes that paper. Very few economists working in the field seems to know this paper, and no one has pursued his methodological approach. Indeed, Simon (2000) signals to economists to use computers simulations and build realistic theories.
This chapter aims at understanding the reason for this apparent paradox. At the same time we review the variety of approaches and interests Simon pursued. And it will be shown, again, that Simon’s aims and methodology are so different from even heterodox economists. The two points may be linked. Simon was interested in problem solving, often practical problems. For this reason there was no need and indeed no chance to have one and only one approach. According to the problem, he pursued what he thought was the best approach. Simon was a true polymath.
