Herbert Simon
1916–2001 · American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist
Topics: complexity, simplicity, learning, software design
Over Christmas, Allen Newell and I created a thinking machine.
— Herbert SimonThe world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.
— Herbert SimonHuman 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 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 SimonThe fact that goals may be dependent for their force on other more distant ends leads to the arrangement of these goals in a hierarchy - each level to be considered as an end relative to the levels below it and as a mean to the levels above it.
— Herbert SimonBefore a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of “acceleration” and “weight.
— Herbert SimonThe 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 SimonSince 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. (p.361)
— Herbert SimonThe 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 Simon