Herbert A. Simon先生紀念 (2026 0615；1 《紐約時報》，《明周文化 MP Weekly 明報周刊文化 ) 村上春樹的短篇小說〈四月某個晴朗的早晨遇見100%的女孩〉（收錄於同名短篇小說集《遇見100%的女孩》中）。：很簡單地說，人生的決策準則是「滿意」（他創英文新字），非最佳或極值…..。 我們每一人都有一套價值與哲學，Simon 選擇四十幾年每天步行來回學校，吃穿等到極簡單，多發表各領域的深入論文，課程創新
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我們前天在關於黃仁勳在CMU 畢業典禮演講，談到我的英雄/筆友 Simon,沒想到隔一天在紐約時報就有這篇。其實這篇文章還提到許多其他故事,如村上的短篇小說，譬如說，大學有兩位戀人，相信如果「真佳偶」，畢業後各自從東與西去「找」，最終一定會重逢的……
很簡單地說，人生的決策準則是「滿意」（他創英文新字），非最佳或極值…..。
我們每一人都有一套價值與哲學，Simon 選擇四十幾年每天步行來回學校，吃穿等到極簡單，多發表各領域的深入論文，課程創新，如法國革命中的決策論等等。
或許找時間將此篇剪貼在此寶地。
孤獨的少年少女在街角偶遇，直覺認定彼此是天作之合——這簡直是奇蹟般的相遇。他們牽着手，暢談數小時。一絲疑慮突然在腦海浮現：「夢想這麼輕易就成真，真的好嗎？」於是，二人決定考驗這段關係：若真是天作之合，即使分開，也必能重逢，到時便可確信。少年向西走，少女向東走。他們確實是天作之合。多年後，兩人在街頭擦肩而過，但記憶已經模糊。最終，二人沒有重逢。
做決策時，如果你總是追求「最好」，恐怕很難感到幸福。
身處資訊泛濫、選擇繁多的時代，我們以為只要拚命尋找，就一定能找到萬中無一的選項。現代香港人會稱之為「選擇困難症」或「完美主義」，心理學家則稱之為「最優主義」（tendency maximizing）。
大多數人都忽略了，「搜尋」本身也是一種成本，如果你把這點納入考慮，就會發現：最好的策略，恰恰不在於追求最好。
人工智能與認知心理學先驅、諾貝爾經濟學獎得主 Herbert Simon 做決策時，會考慮若干選項，偶爾請教他人，選定之後便向前走。他不苦惱，也不後悔。（The best is enemy of the good）是他的座右銘。
他的女兒憶述：父親為免每天挑選顏色款式，只穿同一品牌的襪子；同時只擁有一頂黑色貝雷帽。
以上為文章節錄，完整文章於《明周文化》網站：https://mpweekly.hk/kB3LY
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The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness
May 12, 2026
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By David Epstein
Mr. Epstein is the author of “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.”
If in making decisions you are often guided by a search for the best, you are going about decision making all wrong — and you’re also probably less happy for it.
In an age of information and choice abundance, we assume we can find the best of everything if we look long and hard enough. Psychologists call that tendency maximizing.
But searching for the best is the wrong goal. That is because searching is itself a cost, and most people forget to account for it. If you did, you would see that the optimal strategy isn’t optimizing at all.
There’s a better way to make decisions. To understand it, you should know about Herbert Simon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, as well as a Nobel laureate in economics. Mr. Simon demonstrated that for most decisions, humans can’t really evaluate the options available — there are too many, our information about them is incomplete and our minds aren’t built to weigh them all — and so we rely on mental shortcuts. He coined the term “satisficing” — a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice — to describe how we consider a limited set of options, then choose one that is good enough and move on to live our lives.
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When Mr. Simon faced a decision, he considered a few alternatives, sometimes asked for advice, chose and moved on. He didn’t agonize, and he didn’t second-guess. “The best is enemy of the good” was the mantra he lived by.
Mr. Simon was, as he put it, an “incorrigible satisficer.” His eldest daughter, Katherine, recalled that he wore one brand of socks to avoid selecting color or style each morning, and he owned exactly one black beret at a time, made at a particular haberdashery in Europe.
According to Katherine, he said that one needed only three sets of clothes: “one on one’s body, one in the wash and one in the closet ready to wear.” He always ate the same breakfast — oatmeal, half a grapefruit, black coffee — and lived in the same house for 46 years.
“My father simplified his life in terms of his daily habits,” Katherine wrote, “thus eliminating the need to make little decisions about everything.” By taking the small decisions off his plate, that simplification freed his attention for the people and work that actually mattered to him. The mathematician John Allen Paulos illustrated the same principle with a thought experiment in his 1988 book “Innumeracy”: How should you choose your final romantic partner? First, he argued, you should estimate the number of people you might plausibly date in your lifetime. Then date roughly the first third with no intention of committing. Use that time purely to calibrate what you liked, what you didn’t like and what you might be missing.
After that, commit to the very next person you like better than everyone you’ve already dated. Mr. Paulos was illustrating a well-known result in probability, which shows that this rule gives you the best chance of ending up with the best partner in the whole sequence. Keep pushing past that point, and you’re more likely to end up with a worse match or no one at all. The core insight — that the path to the best outcome runs directly through the willingness to stop searching long before you’ve exhausted the options — extends far beyond dating.
Psychologists who followed up on Mr. Simon’s work have shown that his personal philosophy was both efficient and wise. Shortly after Mr. Simon’s death in 2001, a team of researchers created a maximization scale to measure where a person falls on the spectrum between maximizer and satisficer. They found that it’s usually bad to be a maximizer.
Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first used the term “flow” to describe states of complete absorption in an activity, put it well. By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”
Advertisement This is critical today because chronic maximizing has never been easier. In 2006 an economist calculated that the consumer options available to citizens of modern economies exceeded those of preindustrial societies roughly by a factor of 100 million. That is an almost incomprehensible multiplication of choice, and it extends well beyond consumer goods into questions of who to be, how to live, where to work and whom to love.
Social media has intensified the problem by functioning as an infinite comparison engine. When you can see a curated highlight reel of everyone else’s career, relationship, home and vacation, the very concept of “good enough” begins to feel like settling.
The pull to keep searching for something better has poisoned even the most mundane moments. Research shows that giving viewers many videos to flip between makes them more bored than if they focus on just one. One way to interpret the findings is that the mere notion that something better might be out there spoils the moment.
Studies in the United States and China show that since about 2010, young people have reported becoming increasingly bored. Dating apps have offered a version of Mr. Paulos’s thought experiment, with users forever wondering what might be beyond that next swipe — maximizing in its purest form.
And now artificial intelligence promises to help us optimize everything: our schedules, our diets, our wardrobes, our creative output. If Mr. Simon was right, the hidden danger of these tools is that they will expand the menu of options and comparisons even further. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami captured the maximizer’s tragedy in a short story. A lonely boy and girl meet on a street corner and intuitively recognize that they are the perfect match for each other. It’s a miracle. They hold hands and talk for hours. But then a sliver of doubt creeps in: “Was it really all right for one’s dreams to come true so easily?” They decide on a test. If they truly are perfect for each other, they can part and will inevitably meet again. Then they’ll know for sure. The boy walks off to the west, and the girl to the east. They really were perfect for each other. Years later, they pass in the street, but their memories have faded. They never meet again.
Mr. Simon would not have been surprised they never met again. Whether you’re searching for a dishwasher or a date, set a good-enough standard. Stop when it’s met. Save your cognitive resources for things that matter.
David Epstein is the author of, most recently, “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better” and “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”
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