Really great conversation today about Herbert Simon's 1962 paper "The Architecture of Complexity", thanks as always @RuthMalan for keeping us informed and updated! I could have gone on for hours probably.

This paper impressed on me because it talks about complex systems being hierarchical. And that reminds me a lot of Leonard Meyer's musical analysis methods published just six years before in 1956 - Emotion and Meaning in Music - that performs hierarchical analysis on music. Simon even mentions this in the paper, giving music as an example of hierarchical complexity. Coincidence? Maybe not, Meyer's work was well-known and influential at the time. No citation though.

Gestalt psychology is something Meyer was into and it shows a lot in Simon's thinking. The story of the watchmakers feels like a gestalt approach to complexity, one of them working faster by abstracting away the parts. Like Meyer does with his adoption of "iamb" and "trochee" for application to music, continuous abstraction pulls the lens out to the point that an entire symphony can be one large amphibrach pattern of expectation and release.

Anyway, coincidentally this recent $5 purchase arrived today!

#ComplexSystems #LeonardMeyer #HerbertSimon #Hierarchies #NearDecomposable #PapersInSystems

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
-- Herbert Simon

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #HerbertSimon #Attention #Information

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Triathlon #Runners #StPetersburg #Florida

Wie wir Wirklichkeit entwerfen – und warum das für uns als Gesellschaft so wichtig ist

Was ist wahr? Diese Frage klingt so schlicht, doch sie beschäftigt Philosophen seit Jahrtausenden und auch mich immer wieder. Je älter ich werde, desto öfter spüre ich, wie sich „Wahrheit“ bei genauerem Hinsehen entzieht und verwandelt. Oft erinnert mich mein Nachdenken darüber an den Blick in […]

https://blog.hamdorf.org/wahrheitskonstruktion/

It is not the first time that #AI scientists have been later recognized with a #NobelPrize in another discipline. A famous (but almost forgotten) example is Herbert Simon that won the Turing Award with Newell for the first heuristic programs (e.g. Logic Theorists & GPS) in 1975 and later on the Nobel Prize in Economics for his theory of bounded rationality (representing the fil-rouge of his contribution in AI, cognitive psychology and economics)

#HerbertSimon

@academicchatter @cognition

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
-- Herbert Simon

⬆ #Quotes #HerbertSimon #Attention #Information

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #BWCA #RoseFalls #Minnesota

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
-- Herbert Simon

⬆ #Quotes #HerbertSimon #Attention #Information

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Morning #Mists #Fogbow #LakeSantaFe #Florida

@sarvo @evan

On the #AI / #CognitiveScience / #ComputerScience side of things we used to call this #ProtocolAnalysis, coming of age in formal terms with the work of #AndersEricsson and #HerbertSimon in 1980.