Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon, a Nobel Prize laureate, was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision-making. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. For many years he held the post of Richard King Mellon Professor at...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth15 June 1916
CountryUnited States of America
I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.
Most of us really aren't horribly unique. There are 6 billion of us. Put 'em all in one room and very few would stand out as individuals. So maybe we ought to think of worth in terms of our ability to get along as a part of nature, rather than being the lords over nature
There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we're good people we use it for good purposes.
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.
Learning results from what the student does and thinks, and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.
What a person cannot do he will not do, no matter how much he wants to do it. Normative economics has shown that exact solutions to the larger optimization problems of the real world are simply not within reach or sight. ... the behavior of an artificial system may be strongly influenced by the limits of its adaptive capacities.
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.
Behaving like a manager means having command of the whole range of management skills and applying them as they become appropriate.
Most of what we do to get people ready to act in situations of encounter consists of drilling these lists into them sufficiently deeply so that they will be evoked quickly at the time of the decision.
A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.
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.
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.
No one has characterized market mechanisms better than Friedrich von Hayek
All correct reasoning is a grand system of tautologies, but only God can make direct use of that fact