Herbert A Simon - Collected Quotes

"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, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"Decision making processes are aimed at finding courses of action that are feasible or satisfactory in the light of multiple goals and constraints." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"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." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies. It is the task of knowledge to select from the whole class of possible consequences a more limited subclass, or even (ideally) a single set of consequences correlated with each strategy." (Herbert A Simon, "Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-making Processes in Administrative Organization", 1947)

"As the decision-making function becomes more highly automated, corporate decision making will perhaps provide fewer outlets for creative drives than it now does." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)

"The mathematical and computing techniques for making programmed decisions replace man but they do not generally simulate him." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)

"Programs do not merely substitute brute force for human cunning. Increasingly, they imitate-and in some cases improve upon-human cunning." (Herbert A Simon, "Management and Corporations 1985", 1960)

"Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole." (Herbert A Simon, "The Architecture of Complexity", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 106 (6), 1962)

"Design problems - generating or discovering alternatives - are complex largely because they involve two spaces, an action space and a state space, that generally have completely different structures. To find a design requires mapping the former of these on the latter. For many, if not most, design problems in the real world systematic algorithms are not known that guarantee solutions with reasonable amounts of computing effort. Design uses a wide range of heuristic devices - like means-end analysis, satisficing, and the other procedures that have been outlined - that have been found by experience to enhance the efficiency of search. Much remains to be learned about the nature and effectiveness of these devices." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)

"It is easy to construct conceptual abstractions - like those in the literature of economics and statistical decision theory - that describe decision making as a process of choosing among possible states of the world. Whatever their value for conceptualizing certain aspects of the theory of choice, these abstractions cannot be taken as descriptions of actual decision-making systems, since they ignore a central fact of the decision-making process: that it must be carried out by an information processing system whose computational powers are puny in comparison with the complexity of the environment with which they must cope. Factorization of that complexity by the device of selective attention is an indispensable adaptive mechanism." (Herbert A Simon, "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making", [in "The Logic of Decision and Action"], 1966)

"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, "Computers, Communications and the Public Interest", 1971)