Herbert A. Simon Browse All Authors Top 24 quotes by Herbert A. Simon The choices we make lead up to actual experiences. It is one thing to decide to climb a mountain. It is quite another to be on top of it. Herbert A. Simon decide climb mountain choices Like Humpty Dumpty, we can make words mean anything we want them to mean. Herbert A. Simon words like want mean One finds limits by pushing them. Herbert A. Simon them pushing limits motivational Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational. Herbert A. Simon more new opportunity knowledge My research career has been devoted to understanding human decision-making and problem-solving processes. The pursuit of this goal has led me into the fields of political science, economics, cognitive psychology, computer science and philosophy of science, among others. Herbert A. Simon me economics research science Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, and hard to describe. Herbert A. Simon describe complex hard path 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 A. Simon good technology people thinking 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 A. Simon wealth poverty information attention The density of settlement of economists over the whole empire of economic science is very uneven, with a few areas of modest size holding the bulk of the population. Herbert A. Simon size economic population science 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 A. Simon short painting architecture business By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics. Herbert A. Simon mathematics self science knowledge Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment. Herbert A. Simon environment learning permanent change Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. Herbert A. Simon everyone who design action One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it. Herbert A. Simon rules better you science To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior. Herbert A. Simon environmental nature peace knowledge 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 A. Simon same thought hard successful All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact. Herbert A. Simon system make only god 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 A. Simon behavior simple reflection time No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek. Herbert A. Simon mechanisms market than better 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 A. Simon goals more how things
