Management Craft

Stuart Dreyfus

American operations researcher, professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at UC Berkeley; a pioneer of dynamic programming (with Richard Bellman) and co-developer of the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition with his brother Hubert.

Fact sheet

Class
researcher

Stuart E. Dreyfus is professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley.[1] At the RAND Corporation he programmed the JOHNNIAC computer and co-authored Applied Dynamic Programming with Richard Bellman; dynamic programming, his central field, is one of the mathematical foundations of the reinforcement learning behind modern AI.[1]

With his younger brother Hubert, a philosopher, he built the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, first set out in their 1980 report for the Air Force.[2] He later argued, in his account of “System 0,” that expert intuition is the brain’s procedural memory learning by trial, feedback, and reward, the same reinforcement-learning mechanism his own mathematics helped give the machines.[3]

Mind Over MachineBook · 1988Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus's book on human intuition and expertise versus machine intelligence, elaborating their five-stage model of skill acquisition. First published in hardcover in 1986; the revised 1988 paperback (which corrected the book's account of expertise from 'pattern recognition' to a neural-net 'discrimination and association') is the edition to cite.

References

1
"Stuart Dreyfus," Wikipedia.↩
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Dreyfus
2
Stuart E. Dreyfus and Hubert L. Dreyfus, A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition, ORC 80-2 (Berkeley: Operations Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 1980).↩
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA084551.pdf
3
Stuart E. Dreyfus, "System 0: The Overlooked Explanation of Expert Intuition," in Handbook of Research Methods on Intuition, ed. Marta Sinclair (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2014).↩
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7nk534tm

Keep learning

Dreyfus ModelToolEvery skill runs on a ladder from novice to expert, with a sixth rung, mastery, for those who push further, and where you sit changes how you learn it and how you should be coached. The Dreyfus model is the map: name the rung, name the next one, and the vague feedback that helps no one turns into a plan.