The world this wiki

The idea of LLM Wiki applied to a year of the Economist. Have an LLM keep a wiki up-to-date about companies, people & countries while reading through all articles of the economist from Q2 2025 until Q2 2026.

DOsinga/the_world_this_wiki

people|Good enough

Herbert Simon

American polymath who won the Turing award for artificial intelligence in 1975 and the Nobel prize in economics in 1978. He coined the term "bounded rationality", arguing that economics should model people as "satisficing"—choosing options that are simply good enough, rather than perfect, given the limits of their informational environment—instead of treating them as all-knowing optimisers.

Simon observed that "what information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients," and that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and the need to allocate that attention efficiently." He used the two blades of a pair of scissors to illustrate bounded rationality: decisions come from a combination of the individual's own limitations and the informational environment in which they operate, and asking which blade did the cutting is a mistake, since it is always both.

His work anticipated the modern field of attention economics, in which economists treat attention as a scarce, rivalrous resource alongside land, labour and capital.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge. -- Paul Gauguin