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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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Herbert Simon
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More quotes by Herbert Simon

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Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
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By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
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All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
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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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No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek
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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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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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In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program all else is prophecy.
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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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Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
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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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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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Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.
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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