Herb Simon

And he wrote a paper on power laws and derived why city sizes satisfy a power law.

which is a very old application from the 50s from Herb Simon.

And I said to Xavier, this topic is still interesting, right? Because nobody in economics seems to be working on it.

He wrote two great papers and then just stopped.

And of course, I didn't know what math was and took a couple of years of courses and it's doing okay.

But in addition, when I got there, I realized that Two of the other most famous and important pioneers of computer science were also at Carnegie, which is Al Null and Herb Simon.

Herb, of course, got a Nobel Prize.

They all got all sorts of other awards.

I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

But if you told me that what I'm doing with the call right now would be possible, I think even my mentor, Herb Simon, who was in some ways one of the founders of AI, would be shocked to see where we're at right now.

how did we get here so fast it feels like things are evolving you know day by day at this point like am i wrong like let me know if i'm wrong with that but it seems like just in the past couple years things have exponentially changed or there's been some sort of phase shift But please tell me what the objective reality there

is.

And so what you're doing is you're statistically shown if you increase the collective intelligence of the problem-solving, you will actually find solutions that are better off than if you're narrowly constrained.

And it's actually worth knowing Herb Simon, who was a forefather of AI back in the 1950s and 1960s.

He won a Nobel Prize actually, but for economic work, because Nobel Prize does not go out for AI.

He actually got his PhD looking at decision-making in New York State.

because processing and integrating the complicated information we receive from our senses takes time and is difficult.

So mostly we operate on a kind of predictive mode, so a feed-forward mode, as someone like Herb Simon calls it.

And then when input contradicts the prediction, then it gets corrected, that kind of stuff.

That seems to be the predominant mode.

And this is another reason why we need belonging in teams, because we need teams where we're not just paying attention to the expert or we think is the expert, that we're adding our doubts, adding our pieces, bringing other things in.

Um, so, um, one of the, um, Nobel Prize in, in, um, Economics recipients is a guy named-- I always have to remember his name, Herb Simon, 'cause he's not a household name.

He, he basically said back in 1958, "If you want rationality, you want good decision-making, get a team."

Yeah.