Quotes by Herbert Simon

“Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[By 1985], machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.”

“I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesnt work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.”

“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.”

“One finds limits by pushing them.”

“What a person cannot do he will not do, no matter how much he wants to do it. Normative economics has shown that exact solutions to the larger optimization problems of the real world are simply not within reach or sight. ... the behavior of an artificial system may be strongly influenced by the limits of its adaptive capacities.”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

I dont care how big and fast computers are, theyre not as big and fast as the world.

The proper study of mankind is the science of design.

Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.

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

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

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

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.