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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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Herbert Simon
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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.
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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
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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
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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.
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By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
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Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
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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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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.
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Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.
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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.
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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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I don't care how big and fast computers are, they're not as big and fast as the world.
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The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
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The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.
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No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek
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