Simon's Ants

I was reading Cognitive Systems Engineering when I came across Simon's Metaphor of the Ant (Flach & Bennet, 2018, p. 171) and today I share this with you. This is a metaphor that drove home, for me, the point that it is about the environment and not just the human.

Before coming to the metaphor: Herbert Simon is someone who gave us the Bounded rationality which in many ways has been constrained to the concept of Local Rationality that is now heard in ("new view") safety discourses. While Global rationality assumes that the decision maker knows all the alternatives that are available and can compute the expected utility value of each alternative before making a choie that maximizes expected utility; Bounded rationality, on the other hand is where the limitations of human choice is understood and the decision maker searches for alternatives without having complete (or accurate) knowledge about the consequences of actions, and goes on to choose actions that are expected to be satisfactory. This is Satisficing.

If I went into buy a shirt and picked the first one that I liked which fits me, I have satisficed. On the other hand, if I were to look for all shirts in the store that fit me, lay them out on the counter and then chose the perfect one for me, I maybe maximising : trying to get the perfect shirt.

Lindblom's concept of muddling through maybe aligned with this when he says that you cannot maximise except in, maybe, simple problems. Lindblom talks about two approaches to solving complex problems: by Root or by Branch. The root approach (rational comprehensive method) is similar to global rationality and takes into account all available information, then evaluating and rating it before making a decision. The branch approach (or the successive limited comparison method) is one where we build what is relevant for the current situation and then incrementally improve as we muddle through. (Lindblom, 1959)

The ant on a beach (anywhere actually! But Simon observed them on the beach and so let them stay there) on their way home make his laborious way across a wind- and wave-molded beach. He moves ahead, angles to the right to ease his climb up a steep dune let, detours around a pebble, stops for a moment to exchange information with a compatriot. Thus he makes his weaving, halting way back to his home. The ant zigs and zags instead of taking a straight line home as it adapts to avoid obstacles (Simon, 1996, p. 51)

Simon says that the ant has a general sense of where home lies, but he cannot foresee all the obstacles in between. The ant must change his course repeatedly to the difficulties he encounters. He deals with each obstacle as he comes to it; he probes for ways around or over it, without much thought for future obstacles.

If you looked at the irregular, complex, hard to describe path of the ant that Simon had drawn in his notebook, it would be easy to wonder what the f... was the ant doing. Why does he just not go straight home. Why make it so complex. But Simon says the compexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant. Another small creature, on that same beach with home at the same place might as well follow a very similar path. (Simon, 1996, p. 51)

It is about the environment the ant is in, not the ant itself.

(Simon's scissors and his watchmakers could be another newsletter. Simon loves metaphors and parables. I think.)

References

Flach, J. M., & Bennet, K. B. (2018). Improving Sensemaking through the Design of Representations. In P. J. Smith & R. R. Hoffman (Eds.), Cognitive Systems Engineering: The Future for a Changing World.

Lindblom, C. E. (1959). The Science of “Muddling Through.” In Source: Public Administration Review (Vol. 19, Issue 2). https://www.jstor.org/stable/973677

Simon, H. A. (Herbert A. (1996). The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press.

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