Herbert Simon Quotes

Reason, then, goes to work only after it has been supplied with a suitable set of inputs, or premises. If reason is to be applied to discovering and choosing courses of action, then those inputs include, at the least, a set of should's, or values to be achieved, and a set of is's, or facts about the world in which the action is to be taken. Any attempt to justify these should's and is's by logic will simply lead to a regress to new should's and is's that are similarly postulated.

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.

One of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.

We see that reason is wholly instrumental. It cannot tell us where to go; at best it can tell us how to get there. It is a
gun for hire that can be employed in the service of whatever goals we have, good or bad.

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.

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.

It is not my aim to surprise or shock you - but the simplest way I can summarize is to say that there are now in the world machines that can think, that can learn and that can create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until – in a visible future - the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.

Forget about Nobel prizes; they aren't really very important.

No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek.

Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.

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.

All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact.

Many individuals and organization units contribute to every large decision, and the very problem of centralization and decentralization is a problem of arranging the complex system into an effective scheme.

By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.

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.

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.

One finds limits by pushing them.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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