Herbert Simon quotes - page 4

Herbert Simon was an American economist, political scientist, and cognitive psychologist, renowned for his research in decision-making and artificial intelligence. His interdisciplinary work bridged fields from computer science to organizational theory. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering studies of human decision-making processes. Here are 93 of his quotes:

Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.

Herbert Simon

Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.

Herbert 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 Simon

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.

Herbert Simon

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.

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 intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals.

Herbert Simon

Global rationality, the rationality of neoclassical theory, assumes that the decision maker has a comprehensive, consistent utility function, knows all the alternatives that are available for choice, can compute the expected value of utility associated with each alternative, and chooses the alternative that maximizes expected utility. Bounded rationality, a rationality that is consistent with our knowledge of actual human choice behavior, assumes that the decision maker must search for alternatives, has egregiously incomplete and inaccurate knowledge about the consequences of actions, and chooses actions that are expected to be satisfactory.

Herbert Simon

Rationality requires a choice among all possible alternative behaviors. In actual behavior, only a very few of all these possible alternatives come to mind.

Herbert Simon

Since these questions lie in the future, imagination must supply the lack of experienced feeling in attaching value to them. But values can be only imperfectly anticipated.

Herbert Simon

Rationality requires a complete knowledge and anticipation of the consequences that will follow on each choice. In fact, knowledge of consequences is always fragmentary.

Herbert Simon

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

Herbert Simon

Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, and hard to describe.

Herbert Simon

You can love two or more women at once... but you cannot be loyal to more than one.

Herbert Simon

When computers came along, I felt for the first time that I had the proper tools for the kind of theoretical work I wanted to do. So I moved over to that, and that got me into psychology.

Herbert Simon

The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.

Herbert Simon