Sublime

ideas of what would coalesce into complexity theory later in the twentieth century, highlighted that the actions of individual members could generate information that was highly valuable to the entire crowd.

It might seem like the complexity of predicting geopolitical and economic events would necessitate a group of narrow specialists, each bringing to the team extreme depth in one area. But it was actually the opposite. As with comic book creators and inventors patenting new technologies, in the face of uncertainty, individual breadth was critical. Th

they experiment, they explore, they adjust, they readjust, but not just in terms of having some wondrous mathematical model of the situation and updating a parameter. They form a hypothesis, maybe they have multiple hypotheses or ideas about the situation they are in, and they put more belief in the ones that work over time and throw out hypotheses

Simon formulated the notion now known as bounded rationality: we cannot possibly measure and assess everything as if we were a computer; we therefore produce, under evolutionary pressures, some shortcuts and distortions. Our knowledge of the world is fundamentally incomplete, so we need to avoid getting into unanticipated trouble. And even if our k

One is the neoclassical rational-choice-equilibrium argument that markets automatically come to the Pareto optimal equilibrium for society. This was Ken Arrow and Debreu’s great work. The second is more out of the Hayekian tradition, that markets are efficient at processing distributed information to help coordinate activity in the economy. But bot

People-decisions are time-consuming, for the simple reason that the Lord did not create people as “resources” for organization.

Hence all mathematical derivation can be viewed simply as change in representation,