Verified Quotes
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Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate polymath who showed that human rationality is bounded: no one can find the best option,, gets quoted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. The 6 quotes below are different: each one is checked word for word against the cited work, starting with Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, not copied from aggregator sites that pass misattributions along. The source is named under every line, so you can trace each quote back to the page it came from.
Read Herbert Simon's full profile and how they reason →1 verified quote
On why more information isn't making your decisions better:
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.Herbert Simon, Herbert Simon, Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World
2 verified quotes
On why the way you frame a problem matters more than the answer:
Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.Herbert Simon, Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
On blaming your personality instead of your environment:
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.Herbert Simon, Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial
2 verified quotes
On accepting a good enough choice instead of hunting for the perfect one:
Most human decision making, whether individual or organizational, is concerned with the discovery and selection of satisfactory alternatives; only in exceptional cases is it concerned with optimal alternatives.Herbert Simon, Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior
On accepting that you cannot fully rationally weigh a huge decision:
The 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.Herbert Simon, Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior
1 verified quote
Deciding when to trust a gut call on the job:
Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.Herbert Simon, What Is an Explanation of Behavior? (quoted in Thinking, Fast and Slow)