Simon Herbert Quotes & Sayings

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don't matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient. — Daniel J. Levitin

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. — Herbert Simon

In arguing that machines think, we are in the same fix as Darwin when he argued that man shares common ancestors with monkeys, or Galileo when he argued that the Earth spins on its axis. — Herbert A. Simon

The aim ... is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between two variables or groups of variables in a model ... The concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the 'real' world the model purports to describe. — Herbert Simon

The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating ... even awe-inspiring, but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it. — Herbert Simon

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals. — Herbert Simon

The proper study of mankind is the science of design. — Herbert Simon

I tried to develop some theories that took account of the uncertainty in the world and the complexity in the world. — Herbert A. Simon

I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. My father, an electrical engineer, had come to the United States in 1903 after earning his engineering diploma at the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany. — Herbert A. Simon

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design. — Herbert Simon

I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world. — Herbert Simon

To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior. — Herbert A. Simon

The choices we make lead up to actual experiences. It is one thing to decide to climb a mountain. It is quite another to be on top of it. — Herbert A. Simon

Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme. — Herbert Simon

My home nurtured in me an early attachment to books and other things of the intellect, to music, and to the out of doors. — Herbert A. Simon

Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints. — Herbert Simon

One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it. — Herbert Simon

Most of us really aren't horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us. Put 'em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature, rather than being the lords over nature. — Herbert Simon

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational. — Herbert Simon

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful. — Herbert A. Simon

Whereas economic man maximises, selects the best alternative from among all those available to him, his cousin, administrative man, satisfices, looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or 'good enough'. — Herbert A. Simon

The density of settlement of economists over the whole empire of economic science is very uneven, with a few areas of modest size holding the bulk of the population. — Herbert A. Simon

Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil. — Herbert Simon

Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians. — Herbert Simon

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. — Herbert Simon

The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition. — Herbert Simon

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves. — Herbert A. Simon

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent. — Herbert Simon

Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn. — Herbert Simon

Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn't have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds. — Herbert Simon

By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do. — Herbert Simon

Time and again, we have found the 'idle' truths arrived at through the process of inquiry to be of the greatest moment for practical human affairs. — Herbert A. Simon

All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact. — Herbert Simon

I think those who object to my characterizing man as simple want somehow to retain a deep mystery at his core. — Herbert A. Simon

My research career has been devoted to understanding human decision-making and problem-solving processes. The pursuit of this goal has led me into the fields of political science, economics, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of science, among others. — Herbert A. Simon

Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment. — Herbert Simon

Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important. — Herbert Simon

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the 'hard' sciences so brilliantly successful. — Herbert Simon

In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy. — Herbert Simon

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention ... — Herbert A. Simon

I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. — Herbert A. Simon

By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics. — Herbert A. Simon

I like to think that since I was about 19, I have studied human decision-making and problem-solving. — Herbert A. Simon

Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena. — Herbert Simon

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek. — Herbert Simon

Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly. — Herbert Simon

Like Humpty Dumpty, we can make words mean anything we want them to mean. — Herbert A. Simon

You can love two or more women at once ... but you cannot be loyal to more than one. — Herbert A. Simon

Consider Herbert A. Simon, a right sharp scientific thinker, who did his thinking most frequently at Carnegie Mellon, by which I mean this chap was smart as shit. Check out some of his smart-thinks: "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. Slogan-worthy. — Nick Offerman

Technology may create a condition, but the questions are what do we do about ourselves. We better understand ourselves pretty clearly and we better find ways to like ourselves. — Herbert Simon

One finds limits by pushing them. — Herbert Simon

The Nobel prizes memorialize Alfred Nobel's faith in the contribution that human thought, directed to science and art, can make to human welfare. — Herbert A. Simon

When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology. — Herbert A. Simon

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function. — Herbert Simon

The simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive. — Herbert Simon

Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. — Herbert Simon

Most of what we do to get people ready to act in situations of encounter consists of drilling these lists into them sufficiently deeply so that they will be evoked quickly at the time of the decision. — Herbert Simon

Assuming that a tax increase is necessary, it is clearly preferable to impose the additional cost on land by increasing the land tax, rather than to increase the wage tax - the two alternatives open to the City (of Pittsburgh). It is the use and occupancy of property that creates the need for the municipal services that appear as the largest item in the budget - fire and police protection, waste removal, and public works. The average increase in tax bills of city residents will be about twice as great with wage tax increase than with a land tax increase. — Herbert Simon

We see that reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there. It is a
gun for hire that can be employed in the service of whatever goals we have, good or bad. — Herbert Simon

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds. — Herbert Simon

All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority. — Herbert Simon

Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, and hard to describe. — Herbert A. Simon

Among my European ancestors were piano builders, goldsmiths, and vintners but, to the best of my knowledge, no professionals of any kind. — Herbert A. Simon

Because he treats the world as rather empty and ignores the interrelatedness of all things (so stupefying to thought and action), administrative man can make decisions with relatively simple rules of thumb that do not make impossible demands upon his capacity for thought. — Herbert Simon

Reason, then, goes to work only after it has been supplied with a suitable set of inputs, or premises. If reason is to be applied to discovering and choosing courses of action, then those inputs include, at the least, a set of should's, or values to be achieved, and a set of is's, or facts about the world in which the action is to be taken. Any attempt to justify these should's and is's by logic will simply lead to a regress to new should's and is's that are similarly postulated. — Herbert Simon

I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers. — Herbert A. Simon

There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we're good people we use it for good purposes. — Herbert Simon

Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom. — Herbert Simon