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

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. - 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 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. - 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

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