Herbert Simon Quotes

• 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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  Tags in Philosophy

• 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

• 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

• 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

• The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

  Herbert Simon

• 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

• 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

• One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it.

  Herbert Simon

• One finds limits by pushing them.

  Herbert Simon

• No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.

  Herbert Simon

• 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

• Maybe we ought to have a world in which things are divided between people kind of fairly.

  Herbert Simon

• 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

• In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.

  Herbert Simon

• I don’t care how big and fast computers are, they’re not as big and fast as the world.

  Herbert Simon

• 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

• Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

  Herbert Simon

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Science

• Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren’t really very important.

  Herbert Simon

• 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

• Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

  Herbert Simon

Herbert Simon (22)

Birth:	15th June, 1916
Death:	9th February, 2001
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Economist, Political Scientist, Psychologist

About

Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. He was an American economist, computer scientist, psychologist and political scientist. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. He also received many top-level honors later in life including  APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations", the National Medal of Science, and IJCAI Award for Research Excellence. He received both his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1943. He received an honorary Doctor of Political science degree from University of Pavia in 1988 and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard University in 1990.

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Today's Anniversary - 21st January

Births

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• 1946 - Johnny Oates
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• 1962 - Marie Trintignant
• 1884 - Texas Guinan

Deaths

• 1870 - Alexander Herzen
• 1997 - Colonel Tom Parker
• 2008 - Evan G. Galbraith
• 1924 - Vladimir Lenin
• 1932 - Lytton Strachey