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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek
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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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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By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
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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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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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
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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Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
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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Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
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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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