Psychologists From The United States

"Holland's and Kauffman's work, together with Dawkins' simulations of evolution and Varela's models of autopoietic systems, provide essential inspiration for the new discipline of artificial life, This approach, initiated by Chris Langton (1989, 1992), tries to develop technological systems (computer programs and autonomous robots) that exhibit lifelike properties, such as reproduction, sexuality, swarming, and co-evolution."

"We had summer courses in what was called automata theory; after the first year I directed them. Herb Simon, Al Newell, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, they all came and lectured on them, so there was quite a bit of interaction."

"Actually quite recently, within the last four or five years, Bill and I have got back together again to build agent-based models of language acquisition; so that was a kind of longrange boomerang"

"So anyhow I did math and I had actually started writing a dissertation in mathematics – on cylindrical algebras, algebras that extended Boolean algebras to predicate logic with quantifiers"

"That time at IBM was obviously an influence on me. I worked for them for eighteen months and then decided I really did want to go to graduate school."

"I think it’s still true, you had to do a dissertation for your bachelor’s degree. I decided that I wanted to do something that was really quite new: work with the first real-time computer"

"Not particularly, although my parents always encouraged me and supported my interest, from the first chemistry set they bought me,"

"The end point, a cas simulation with a realistic interface, is highly desirable, because it enables an ecologist, or economist, or politician to try out alternatives that could not possibly tried in real systems."

"Model building is the art of selecting those aspects of a process that are relevant to the question being asked. As with any art, this selection is guided by taste, elegance, and metaphor; it is a matter of induction, rather than deduction. High science depends on this art."

"Unwrapping occurs when the "solution" is explicitly built into the program from the start."

"There is more of a mystery to the origin of the pin factory that Adam Smith (1776) discusses in his Wealth of Nations than is generally realized."

"Looking back to data, we can see if the consequences are plausible; looking forward to theory, we can see if general principles are suggested."

"The measure of performance of any given agent is the amount of money it accumulates through its actions."

"Evolution continually innovates, but at each level it conserves the elements that are recombined to yield the innovations."

"Particular individuals do not recur, but their building blocks do."

"When a new building block is discovered, the result is usually a range of innovations."

"If there is to be a competition, there must be some basis for resolving it. It is also clear that the competition should be experienced based."

"This use of building blocks to generate internal models is a pervasive feature of complex adaptive systems."

"The recycling of resource by the aggregate behavior of a diverse array of agents is much more than the sum of the individual actions."

"The multiplier effect is a major feature of networks and flows. It arises regardless of the particular nature of the resource, be it goods, money, or messages."

"nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging."

""Doing science," particularly the synthesis of disparate ideas, is not as arcane as it is often made out to be. Discipline and taste play a vital role, but the activity is familiar to anyone who has made some effort to be creative."

"If we are to understand the interactions of a large number of agents, we must first be able to describe the capabilities of individual agents."

"With theory, we can separate fundamental characteristics from fascinating idiosyncrasies and incidental features. Theory supplies landmarks and guideposts, and we begin to know what to observe and where to act."

"Women must begin to "save" themselves and their daughters before they "save" their husbands and their sons; before they "save" the whole world."

"If some of what enables people in our society to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a Pareto improving move. Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all of this excess choice plagues us."

"[In] the world we used to live in... there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice, and the world we now live in looks like [The Ten Commandments Do-It-Yourself Kit]. Is this good news or bad news? [T]he answer is both."

"We are blessed... with the technology which enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet... We have to make a decision again and again... about whether we should or shouldn't be working. ...and even if they're all shut off, every minute... we are asking ourselves, "Should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" And even if the answer... is no, it's... going to make your experience... different..."

"There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me... They expect us to call our doctors... and ask for our prescriptions to be changed."

"It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead... the doctor tells you "Well we could do A or we could do B. A has these benefits and these risks. B has these benefits and these risks. What do you want to do?" ...We call it patient autonomy... but what it really is, is a shifting of the burden and responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something... to someone who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick, and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions..."

"We almost have an unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. ...It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much."

"There was a time when I was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. Once consequence of that... is that the phone never broke."

"I want to start with what I call the official dogma... of all Western industrial societies... "If we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens... maximize individual freedom. ...The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.""

"Agonizing over whether your love is "the real thing" or your sexual relationship above or below par, and wondering whether you could have done better is a prescription for misery. Knowing that you've made a decision choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it."

"[W]e should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject."

"[W]hen face with overwhelming choice, we... become "pickers,"... we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic."

"[W]e must decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time and energy there, letting many other opportunities pass us by."

"[W]hat is most important to us, most of the time, is not the objective results of a decision, but the subjective results."

"Having too many choices produces psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize."

"[W]e now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history."

"[C]hoice in many facets of our life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real."

"Identity is much less a thing people "inherit" than it used to be."

"The average American thirty-two-year-old has... worked for nine... companies. ...[J]ob-switching has become so natural that individuals that have worked for the same employer for five years are regarded with suspicion. ...[T]heir desirability or ambition is called into question ..."

"[C]osmetic surgery is slowly shifting from being a procedure that people gossip about to being a commonplace tool for self-improvement."

"Ask yourself what is the point of advertising prescription drugs... Clearly they... expect we will... demand that our doctors write the prescriptions."

"Responsibility for medical care has landed on the... patient with a resounding thud. ...The tenor of medical practice has shifted from... the all-knowing, paternalistic doctor... to one in which the doctor arrays the possibilities... along with the likely pluses and minuses... and the patient makes the choice."

"I am not suggesting that deregulation and competition in the telephone and power industries are bad things. ...But the problem is that state regulators aren't there anymore to make sure customers don't get ripped off. ...[E]ven if you keep what you've always had, you may end up paying substantially more ..."

"Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy [and] the number of processes... to obtain the necessities of life. ...In the past few decades, though, that long process of simplifying and bundling economic offerings has been reversed. Increasingly, the trend moves back toward time-consuming foraging behavior..."

"Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of our consciousness."

"A large array of options may discourage customers because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making the decision. ...[T]hinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one."