proclaimed without any concern

Only human pride argues that the apparent intricacies of our path stem from a quite different source than the intricacy of the ant’s path.

The organism must develop correlations between goals in the sensed world and actions in the world of process. When they are made conscious and verbalized, these correlations correspond to what we usually call means-ends analysis.

What is striking about these documents is their practical sense and the awareness they exude of the limits of foresight about large human affairs.

In a couple of domains where the matter has been studied, we do know that even the most talented people require approximately a decade to reach top professional proficiency.

The success of planning on such a scale may call for modesty and restraint in setting the design objectives

Thus the traditional definition of the professional’s role is highly compatible with bounded rationality, which is most comfortable with problems having clear-cut and limited goals.

too—but the (perhaps temporary) dominance of our species over the globe today is witness to the augmentation of human reason—applied to local, not global, concerns—that has been made possible by these social artifacts.

We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches.