Herbert Simon quotes - page 4

Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds. (Herbert Simon)
Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom. View quote
Herbert Simon
Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Herbert Simon
The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Herbert Simon
Decision theory can be pursued not only for the purposes of building foundations for political economy, or of understanding and explaining phenomena that are in themselves intrinsically interesting, but also for the purpose of offering direct advice to business and governmental decision makers. For reasons not clear to me, this territory was very sparsely settled prior to World War II. Such inhabitants as it had were mainly industrial engineers, students of public administration, and specialists in business functions, none of whom especially identified themselves with the economic sciences. Prominent pioneers included the mathematician, Charles Babbage, inventor of the digital computer, the engineer, Frederick Taylor and the administrator, Henri Fayol. During World War II, this territory, almost abandoned, was rediscovered by scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians concerned with military management and logistics, and was renamed "operations research” or "operations analysis.”. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Herbert Simon
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. View quote
Herbert Simon
Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant's path is irregular, complex, and hard to describe. View quote
Herbert Simon
You can love two or more women at once... but you cannot be loyal to more than one. View quote
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. View quote
Herbert Simon
The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful. View quote
Herbert Simon