Herbert A. Simon

“Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared mind...

“Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

Selection of actions

“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 (1916-2001)

information-rich world overload attention

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. 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 Simon (1916-2001)

old wine new bottles old words new meaning

"If men do not pour new wine into old bottles, they do something almost as bad: they invest old words with new meanings."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

science unorder fact relations progress orderliness library

"This is exactly what science is: the process of replacing unordered masses of brute fact with tidy statements of orderly relations from which these facts can be inferred. The progress of science, far from cluttering up the world with new information, enormously increases the redundancy of libraries by discovering the orderliness of the information already stored."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

scarce resource time recipient serial devices comuter human

"A relatively straightforward way of measuring how much scarce resource a message consumes is by noting how much time the recipient spends on it. Human beings, like contemporary computers, are essentially serial devices. They can attend to only one thing at a time."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

information-rich world cost recipient produce transmit attention

"In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. It is not enough to know how much it costs to produce and transmit information; we must also know how much it costs, in terms of scarce attention, to receive it."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

design principle information absorb listen think speak

"A general design principle can be put as follows:

An information-processing subsystem (a computer or new organization unit) will reduce the net demand on the rest of the organization's attention only if it absorbs more information previously received by others than it produces that is, if it listens and thinks more than it speaks."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

information-processing system IPS condenser withold attention

"To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information- processing system (abbreviated IPS) must be an information condenser. It is conventional to begin designing an IPS by considering the information it will supply. In an information-rich world, however, this is doing things backwards. The crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

redundancy fact random predict store

"The most important and subtle form of redundancy derives from the world's being highly lawful. Facts are random if no part of them can be predicted from any other part that is, if they are independent of each other. Facts are lawful if certain of them can be predicted from certain others. We need store only the fraction needed to predict the rest."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

attention scarce organizations top US government array single

"Attention is generally scarce in organizations, particularly scarce at the tops, and desperately scarce at the top of the organization called the United States Government. There is only one President. Although he is assisted by the Budget Bureau, the Office of Science and Technology, and other elements of the Executive Office, a frightening array of matters converges on this single, serial, human information-processing system."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

knowledge-rich read write store extract exploit thinking program

"In a knowledge-rich world, progress does not lie in the direction of reading and writing information faster or storing more of it. Progress lies in the direction of extracting and exploiting the patterns of the world so that far less information needs to be read, written, or stored. Progress depends on our ability to devise better and more powerful thinking programs for man and machine."

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)

wealth of information

“...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...”

― Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)