Models of My Life

Rating:
Summary: Stories from a polymath
Review: Can the autobiography of a mild-mannered academic, whose revolutionary acts were primarily inside his head, write an interesting autobiography? As a matter of fact, yes.

Herb Simon is best known for his nobel-prize winning work in economics, but he in fact made amazing contributions to several fields. He began in political science and management, focusing on the question of how managers make choices. His unorthodox (at the time) view was they are not fully rational--their rationality is bounded by a limitation on the number of options they can consider, and how deeply they can consider them. This insight and perspective was later applied to economics and to cognitive psychology with great profit. This contribution was far from his only one, however; in psychology, Simon (with Cliff Shaw and Alan Newell) came up with the profound insight that the human mind could be considered a symbol-processing device.

How gripping is the telling of these achievements? In truth, not very, and Simon wisely doesn't dwell on them, nor try to turn them into a detective story. (I think the description of the writing of the first artificial intelligence program covers all of about 5 pages.) Instead, Simon simply tells the story of his life as it was, doling out observations as he goes. Simon is such an interesting and wise storyteller that you are quite happy to sit at his knee and listen to his stories spin. And if the story slows (as some of them do) your pleasure won't dim if you flip forward a few pages and begin the next one.

Along the way, you'll be treated to a number of interesting observations and rules of thumb about how to live one's life, for example, Simon's rule of travel. It says, in paraphrase, that if the purpose is to learn, it is more effectient to read about travel than to travel.

There are worse ways to spend one's time than to listen to a very old genius tell you what he has learned about life.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book, Great Man
Review: Herbert Simon is an amazing figure in the world of science. A Noble winner in economics, a well-known contributor in psychology, and an expert in organizational study. People who know him always wonder how can he be so successful in different fields. By reading this book, you are able to get the light of the stories behind his success.

As same as the papers he wrote for his research work, Simon's writings are always straightforward and intrigue you to think about the world we are living. When you read this book, it may change your thinking of this world. By reading his books, you would understand why simple human being will always have complex behavior.

Though passed in Feb., 2001, Herbert Simon is an unforgettable figure to our lives.

Rating:
Summary: Learn the Why and How of a Distinguished Life
Review: Herbert Simon's research contributes to human knowledge in many different areas, including economics, artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and organizational behavior. In each of the mentioned areas, his contributions are ranked among the most important and influential that even a scientist who focuses solely in one area finds hard to achieve. The testimony is the top awards that the community in each discipline bestowed upon him--the Nobel prize is only one of which.

The secret of this interdisciplinary success is that he is, in his own word, a "monomaniac", studying only one thing--human decision process--for fifty years. The field of his own choosing is not bounded by usual academic disciplines, however, and he did study it from many different aspects, from the levels of individual cognition to organizational decisions, using tools as varied as mathematics, computer simulations, and human subjects.

This book detailed his own account of the various aspects of his life, personal and professional, in a sincere and direct prose. From the childhood that undoubtedly helped set the tone for his later accomplishments, the way he managed and nurtured new academic thoughts that later grown into full-fledged disciplines (artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and, less prominently, bounded rationality), to the philosophy of working and living including brief exposures to familial life, we can learn tremendously from hise xperience, decisions, and actions.

How could he achieve as much as he did? We can glean several lessons from his stories. He collaborated extensively. He learned a great deal from the outstanding individuals he respected. He had a love for truth and rigor in reasoning. An empiricist who firmly believed that any valid theory must be based on empirical facts, he did not hesitate to fight against widely held beliefs conflicting with facts. His work on bounded rationality which helped earn him the Nobel Prize is an outstanding case which his stubborn, and valid, arguments against mainstream theories brought a valuable alternative viewpoint to the world. Strong passion and the ability to break out of the mold and stand tall under storms are important characteristics exemplified by many past giants, including Galileo, Columbus, and Einstein.

Not just a normal autobiography, but the story of a distinguished life we all can learn from.

Rating:
Summary: Renaissance Man of the 20th Century
Review: The late Herbert Simon was a veritable renaissance man. His autobiography, "Models of My Life," discusses the single thread that underlined all of his intellectual conquests in artificial intelligence, sociology, cognitive science, psychology and economics. This one thread, animated by philosophical positivism and ripe scientific thirst, was his deep obsession with modeling and researching decision-theoretic behavior.

It's interesting to note that even though decision theory (how intelligent agents percieve and act upon choices amid various modalities) serves as the impetus for Simons work, he uses "Models" instead of "Model" in the book's title. This is no accident. For you see, beautifully fitting of his memoir, this book delves into how Simon's one passion was his "heuristic" in choosing which of many paths he could have taken througout his life. The upshot: Simon's own life emulated the heuristic search (in AI) that he helped invent! Consequently, this lead him all over the globe, from Wisconsin to UChicago to Berkeley to Carnegie Mellon to China.

This book is also about the times of Simon: the positivistic turn in social sciences, the scientific fermet of the 1950's, the cultural tumult of the 60's, the death of behaviorism and the rise of cognitivism -- all along, peppered with intrigue of the politics of academia. Although the writing can get quite dry at times, his book is highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Renaissance Man of the 20th Century
Review: The late Herbert Simon was a veritable renaissance man. His autobiography, "Models of My Life," discusses the single thread that underlined all of his intellectual conquests in artificial intelligence, sociology, cognitive science, psychology and economics. This one thread, animated by philosophical positivism and ripe scientific thirst, was his deep obsession with modeling and researching decision-theoretic behavior.

It's interesting to note that even though decision theory (how intelligent agents percieve and act upon choices amid various modalities) serves as the impetus for Simons work, he uses "Models" instead of "Model" in the book's title. This is no accident. For you see, beautifully fitting of his memoir, this book delves into how Simon's one passion was his "heuristic" in choosing which of many paths he could have taken througout his life. The upshot: Simon's own life emulated the heuristic search (in AI) that he helped invent! Consequently, this lead him all over the globe, from Wisconsin to UChicago to Berkeley to Carnegie Mellon to China.

This book is also about the times of Simon: the positivistic turn in social sciences, the scientific fermet of the 1950's, the cultural tumult of the 60's, the death of behaviorism and the rise of cognitivism -- all along, peppered with intrigue of the politics of academia. Although the writing can get quite dry at times, his book is highly recommended.