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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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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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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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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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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
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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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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The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
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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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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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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Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
Herbert Simon
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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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No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek
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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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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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 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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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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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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All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact
Herbert Simon