Herbert A. Simon Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
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
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
Human problem solving, from the most blundering to the most insightful, involves nothing more than varying mixtures of trial and error and selectivity.

Herbert A. Simon
Scientific discovery, when viewed in detail, is an excruciatingly slow and painful process.

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

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
Problem formulation in science is to be understood by looking at the continuity of the whole stream of scientific endeavor.

Herbert A. 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 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
Economic man deals with the "real world" in all its complexity. Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastic simplified model... He makes his choices using a simple picture of the situation that takes into account just a few of the factors that he regards as most relevant and crucial.

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
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
If by motivation we mean whatever it is that causes someone to follow a particular course of action, then every actionis motivated — by definition. But in most human behavior the relation between motives and action is not simple; it is mediated by a whole chain of events and surrounding conditions. We observe a man scratching his arm. His motive (or goal)? To relieve an itch.

Herbert A. Simon
The world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.

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
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
In view of the dramatic effects that alternative representations may produce on search and recognition processes, it may seem surprising that the differential effects on inference appear less strong. Inference is largely independent of representation if the information content of the two sets of inference rules [one operating on diagrams and the other operating on verbal statements] is equivalent—i. e. the two sets are isomorphs as they are in our examples

Herbert A. Simon
Organizations and institutions permit stable expectations to be formed by each member of the group as to the behavior of the other members under specified conditions.

Herbert A. Simon
In the process of decision those alternatives are chosen which are considered to be appropriate means of reaching desired ends. Ends themselves, however, are often merely instrumental to more final objectives. We are thus led to the conception of a series, or hierarchy, of ends. Rationality has to do with the construction of means-ends chains of this kind.

Herbert A. Simon
We distinguish diagrammatic from sentential paper-and-pencil representations of information by developing alternative models of information-processing systems that are informationally equivalent and that can be characterized as sentential or diagrammatic. Sentential representations are sequential, like the propositions in a text. Diagrammatic representations are indexed by location in a plane. Diagrammatic representations also typically display information that is only implicit in sentential representations and that therefore has to be computed, sometimes at great cost, to make it explicit for use. We then contrast the computational efficiency of these representations for solving several. illustrative problems in mathematics and physics.

Herbert A. Simon