Herbert Simon Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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The simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive.
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One finds limits by pushing them.
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Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.
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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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Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.
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Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
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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.
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All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority.
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In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.
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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.
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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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Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state.
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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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Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.
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The aim ... is to provide a clear and rigorous basis for determining when a causal ordering can be said to hold between two variables or groups of variables in a model . . . . The concepts refer to a model-a system of equations-and not to the 'real' world the model purports to describe.
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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.
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Creativity is no less challenging or exciting when the mystery is stripped from the creative process. The most beautiful flowers grow under careful cultivation from common soil.
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The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
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Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.
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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.
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Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.
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Assuming that a tax increase is necessary, it is clearly preferable to impose the additional cost on land by increasing the land tax, rather than to increase the wage tax - the two alternatives open to the City (of Pittsburgh). It is the use and occupancy of property that creates the need for the municipal services that appear as the largest item in the budget - fire and police protection, waste removal, and public works. The average increase in tax bills of city residents will be about twice as great with wage tax increase than with a land tax increase.
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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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The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
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Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.
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By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
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Related Authors
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Rudolf Carnap Philosopher -
Harold Lasswell Political Scientist -
Daniel Kahneman Psychologist -
Kenneth Arrow Economist -
Franco Modigliani Economist -
Ronald Coase Economist -
Gerd Gigerenzer Psychologist -
Marvin Minsky Scientist -
Oliver E. Williamson Economist -
Henry George Writer -
Richard Thaler Economist -
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Allen Newell Researcher -
Amos Tversky Cognitive Psychologist -
Udny Yule Statistician -
Chester Barnard Author -
Douglas McGregor Professor -
Frederick Winslow Taylor Mechanical Engineer -
Mary Parker Follett Social Worker -
