Herbert A. Simon Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Definition of design = Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts 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.

Herbert A. Simon
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
The first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal.

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

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
The principle of bounded rationality [is] the capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world — or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

Herbert A. Simon
The first task of administrative theory is to develop a set of concepts that will permit the description, in terms relevant to the theory, of administrative situations. These concepts, to be scientifically useful, must be operational; that is, their meanings must correspond to empirically observable facts or situations.

Herbert A. Simon
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.

Herbert A. Simon
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.

Herbert A. Simon
Computers were within my sphere of attention, but only computers used as number crunchers. In spite of the "giant brain" metaphor, there is little suggestion in this 1950 talk that the most important application of computers might lie in imitating intelligence symbolically, not numerically.

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

Herbert A. Simon
Modem mainstream economic theory bravely assumes that people make their decisions in such a way as to maximize their utility. Accepting this assumption enables economics to predict a great deal of behavior (correctly or incorrectly) without ever making empirical studies of human actors.

Herbert A. Simon
The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos.

Herbert A. Simon
Roughly speaking, rationality is concerned with the selection of preferred behavior alternatives in terms of some system of values, whereby the consequences of behavior can be evaluated.

Herbert A. Simon
The true line is not between hard natural science and soft social sciences, but between precise science limited to highly abstract and simple phenomena in the laboratory and inexact science and technology dealing with complex problems in the real world.

Herbert A. Simon
A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.

Herbert A. Simon
In Administrative Behavior, bounded rationality is largely characterized as a residual category — rationality is bounded when it falls short of omniscience. And the failures of omniscience are largely failures of knowing all the alternatives, uncertainty about relevant exogenous events, and inability to calculate consequences. There was needed a more positive and formal characterization of the mechanisms of choice under conditions of bounded rationality... Two concepts are central to the characterization: search and satisficing.

Herbert A. Simon
Since my world picture approximates reality only crudely, I cannot aspire to optimize anything; at most, I can aim at satisficing. Searching for the best can only dissipate scarce cognitive resources; the best is the enemy of the good.

Herbert A. Simon
Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.

Herbert A. Simon
We will likely also find that the nature of the problem to be solved will be a principal determinant of the mix. With our growing understanding of the organization of judgmental and intuitive processes, of the specific knowledge that of the specific knowledge that is required to perform particular judgmental tasks, and of the cues that evoke such knowledge in situations in which it is relevant, we have a powerful new tool for improving expert judgment. We can specify the knowledge and the recognition capabilities that experts in a domain need to acquire, and use these specifications for designing appropriate learning procedures.

Herbert A. Simon
In these two essays [the papers of 1955 and 1956] the focus is upon ways of simplifying the choice problem to bring it within the power of human computation... The key to the simplification of the choice process in both cases is the replacement of the goal of maximizing with the goal of satisficing, of finding a course of action that is 'good enough'. I have tried, in these two essays, to show why this substitution is an essential step in the application of the principle of bounded rationality.

Herbert A. Simon
A major task in organizing is to determine, first, where the knowledge is located that can provide the various kinds of factual premises that decisions require.

Herbert A. Simon