Herbert A. Simon > Quotes

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. 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

“...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...”
― Herbert A. Simon

“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, The Sciences of the Artificial

“Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.
”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“You do not change people's minds by defeating them with logic.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one's inadequacies show.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“Teaching is not entertainment, but it is unlikely to be successful unless it is entertaining (the more respectable word is interesting.)”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“I advise my graduate students to pick a research problem that is important (so that it will matter if it is solved), but one for which they have a secret weapon that gives some prospect of success. Why a secret weapon? Because if the problem is important, other researchers as intelligent as my students will be trying to solve it; my students are likely to come in first only by having access to some knowledge or research methods the others do not have.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“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.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“To make interesting scientific discoveries, you should acquire as many good friends as possible who are energetic, intelligent and knowledgeable as they can be. You will find all the programs you need are stored in your friends, and will execute productively and creatively as long as you don't interfere too much.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“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.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organisations

“... although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“The greatest asset of the university has been its capacity for innovation. That capacity, in turn, rests partly on its traditions of small size, weak interdepartmental boundaries, and solid adminstrative support (or at least hunting licenses) for entrepreneurial undertakings.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friederich von Hayek who, in the decades after World War II, was their leading interpreter and defender. His defense did not rest primarily upon the supposed optimum attained by them but rather upon the limits of the inner environment—the computational limits of human beings:31”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“We measure our success not only by the quality of teaching and research on our own campus, but by our influence on intellectual and educational trends in the nation and internationally.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“It is true that humanity is faced with many problems. It always has been but perhaps not always with such keen awareness of them as we have today. We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches. Our grandchildren cannot ask more of us than that we offer to them the same chance for adventure, for the pursuit of new and interesting designs, that we have had.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“There is no use in lecturing unless a class is listening. And they will only listen if you are saying something they think they can understand and seems relevant. If you pace up and down you can tell from their moving head whether they are following you.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Coverage of material is a snare and a delusion. You begin where students are prepared to begin; and you carry them as far as you can without losing them.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“When a domain reaches a point where the knowledge for skillful professional practice cannot be acquired in a decade, more or less, then several adaptive developments are likely to occur. Specialization will usually increase (as it has, for example, in medicine), and practitioners will make increasing use of books and other external reference aids in their work.

Architecture is a good example of a domain where much of the information a professional requires is stored in reference works, such as catalogues of available building materials, equipment, and components, and official building codes. No architect expects to keep all of this in his head or to design without frequent resort to these information sources. In fact architecture can almost be taken as a prototype for the process of design in a semantically rich task domain. The emerging design is itself incorporated in a set of external memory structures: sketches, floor plans, drawings of utility systems, and so on. At each stage in the design process, partial design reflected in these documents serves as a major stimulus suggesting to the designer what he should attend to next. This direction to new sub-goals permits in turn new information to be extracted from memory and reference sources and another step to be taken toward the development of the design.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“An entrepreneur is a broker between ideas and resources. This is not confined to business; it is at least as much at home in academia. Faculty members write their dreams of undiscovered truths in research proposals addressed persuasively to foundations and government agencies.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“Artificial intelligence has had much the same effect as Darwin's theory. Both aroused in some people anxieties about their own uniqueness, value and worth.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“Anything you cannot communicate without reading will be forgotten instantly.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“People have to be motivated to contribute to the society, to produce. At the same time, they have to be protected if they are unable to take care of themselves. If the first is more important you're a Republican the second Democrat.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“....it gets easier, not harder, to administer as you move upward in an organization.”
― Herbert A. Simon

“When I examine my experimental research, I find to my embarrassment I rarely provided a control condition. What could I have possibly learned from these ill-designed experiments? The answer (it surprised me) is that you can test theoretical models without a control condition.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“It should not be supposed that every advance in human knowledge increases the amount of information that has to be mastered by professionals. On the contrary, some of the most important progress in science is the discovery and testing of powerful new theories that allow large numbers of facts to be subsumed under a few general principles. There is a constant competition between the elaboration of knowledge and its compression into more parsimonious form by theories. Hence it is not safe to say that the professional chemist must learn more today than a half century ago, before the general laws of quantum mechanics were announced.”
― Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial

“I resolved to major in economics, until I learned that it required an accounting course. I switched to political science, which had no such requirement. (A strange beginning for someone who was later to be a founding father of a business school and a Nobel Laureate in economics.)”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“In essence our failure was a vivid demonstration, which I have never forgotten, that theories, however plausible and “obviously” valid, can be destroyed totally by the obstinate facts of the real world. Davis had brought us an unbeatable scheme for raising cattle profitably. The cattle had a different scheme. No doubt my later deep skepticism of the a priorism of mainstream economics had some of its origins in this experience.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life

“We have adopted the policy of Sorel of propaganda of the deed. The best rhetoric comes from building and testing models and running experiments. Let philosophers weave webs of words; such webs break easily.”
― Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life