Herbert Simon Quotes

Herbert Simon (22)

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

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Today's Anniversary - 20th May

Births

• 1960 - Tony Goldwyn
• 1908 - James Stewart
• 1978 - Sasha Azevedo
• 1942 - Lynn Davies
• 1915 - Moshe Dayan

Deaths

• 1956 - Max Beerbohm
• 1506 - Christopher Columbus
• 1930 - Henry Flagler
• 2012 - Robin Gibb
• 1713 - Thomas Sprat

• 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

• 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

• 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