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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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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
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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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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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Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
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No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek
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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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One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it
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By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
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The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
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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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The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.
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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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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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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
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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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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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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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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