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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

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Herbert Simon
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More quotes by 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.
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
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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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Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.
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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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
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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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I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.
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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Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
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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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
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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.
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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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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In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program all else is prophecy.
Herbert Simon
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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
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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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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
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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