Wired for Thought

CHAPTER 4

Too Much of a Good Thing

INFORMATION OVERLOAD—too much data—was a problem of particular interest to a young man named Herbert Simon. Simon was a business expert who had helped administer the Marshall Plan and in 1947 wrote a book about operations research called Administrative Behavior.¹ In 1978, Simon won the Nobel Prize in economics for demonstrating that economics has as much to do with the brain as it does with math. He spent the rest of his life trying to build a computer that could think like a brain. There wasn’t as much theory then about how the brain works, but Simon instinctively realized that people don’t make decisions by weighing every possible alternative. They simply don’t have the time. So they make “good enough” decisions ...