"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
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Quote collection
Herbert Simon quotes (page 1 of 3)
43 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"One finds limits by pushing them."
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"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."
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"Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent."
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"Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds."
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"Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state."
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"The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function."
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"Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment."
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"The proper study of mankind is the science of design."
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"Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom."
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"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."
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"Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena."
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"Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."
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"A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design."
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"By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do."
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"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."
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"The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition."
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