"The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the "hard" sciences so brilliantly successful"
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There is an almost mischievous provocation tucked into Simon's phrasing: the scare-quoted "hard" sciences. He’s not just praising physics or chemistry; he’s poking at the prestige economy that treats mathematics as a membership card for seriousness. By framing rigor and mathematical underpinnings as the secret sauce behind "brilliant" success, Simon signals both admiration and impatience: admiration for what formal models can do, impatience with the looser, story-driven habits that long dominated parts of economics, psychology, and political science.
The intent is reformist, but it’s also strategic. Simon is making a bid to reclassify the social sciences from interpretive or descriptive enterprises into predictive ones, where arguments can be checked, not merely debated. That’s a power move in mid-20th-century academia, when funding, status, and institutional authority increasingly followed quantification. Under the surface is a quiet accusation: without formal constraints, social science can drift into ideology, vibes, or retrospective explanation dressed up as theory.
Context matters because Simon’s career sits at the intersection of operations research, cognitive psychology, and early AI. His signature ideas - bounded rationality, satisficing, decision-making under constraints - are precisely the kinds of concepts that become sharper when you can model them. The quote works because it captures a generational pivot: not a naive belief that humans are equations, but a demand that our claims about humans be disciplined enough to fail.
The intent is reformist, but it’s also strategic. Simon is making a bid to reclassify the social sciences from interpretive or descriptive enterprises into predictive ones, where arguments can be checked, not merely debated. That’s a power move in mid-20th-century academia, when funding, status, and institutional authority increasingly followed quantification. Under the surface is a quiet accusation: without formal constraints, social science can drift into ideology, vibes, or retrospective explanation dressed up as theory.
Context matters because Simon’s career sits at the intersection of operations research, cognitive psychology, and early AI. His signature ideas - bounded rationality, satisficing, decision-making under constraints - are precisely the kinds of concepts that become sharper when you can model them. The quote works because it captures a generational pivot: not a naive belief that humans are equations, but a demand that our claims about humans be disciplined enough to fail.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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