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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

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Herbert Simon
Design
Painting
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Business
Engineering
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Architecture
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Medicine
Necessary
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Short

More quotes by Herbert Simon

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In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program all else is prophecy.
Herbert Simon
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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.
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The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
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Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.
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I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.
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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
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All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact
Herbert Simon
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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
Herbert Simon
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By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
Herbert Simon
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.
Herbert Simon
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Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
Herbert Simon
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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
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The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.
Herbert Simon
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One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it
Herbert Simon
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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