6 ideas
Reason works only from premises: given goals and facts, it can tell you how to reach those goals, but it cannot tell you which goals to hold. Ultimate values must enter from outside reason, through emotion, culture, or evolved preferences. A rational argument about 'ought' therefore always rests on at least one 'ought' premise that was assumed rather than derived.
Real agents cannot list all alternatives, foresee all consequences, or hold a consistent utility function over every possible future. Instead they search through options one at a time and stop at the first one that meets an aspiration level. They raise that aspiration level when good options come easily and lower it when search fails, which makes 'good enough' a moving threshold rather than a fixed compromise.
Simon contrasts three models of rational choice. The Olympian model, subjective expected utility, assumes a single consistent value function applied across all possible world states. The behavioral model treats choice as limited search inside a narrow, attention-bounded slice of the problem. The intuitive model treats good judgment as fast pattern recognition. The first is a normative ideal that no one can compute, while the other two describe how humans actually decide.
Expert intuition is recognition of familiar patterns drawn from memory, not a mystical faculty. A chess master has stored on the order of 50,000 familiar board configurations, each linked to candidate moves, so a glance at a position retrieves plausible actions without deliberate search. Intuition and analysis are therefore complementary: intuition proposes quickly, and analysis checks what it proposes.
Natural selection does not find global optima. It makes local, short-sighted improvements relative to a current environment that is itself shifting as other organisms evolve. Fitness is therefore always relative to niches that keep being created and destroyed, so 'survival of the fittest' describes survival of the fitter-than-nearby competitors. Evolution satisfices in the same way individual minds do.
Docility is the disposition to accept social instruction without checking it independently. It gives bounded individuals a large fitness advantage because they gain knowledge they could never discover alone. Because learning from society comes as a package, societies can bundle in some behaviors that benefit the group at the individual's expense. That bundled 'altruism tax' is how altruism survives selection.