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Herbert A. Simon Quotes

Total quotes: 5
“My training as an economist has been of help in one important way: It convinced me that the only information that is of value in a financial market is information that other people don’t have.”
— Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life(MIT Press)
Tagged: Economics, Secret Information, Knowledge Is Power, What You Know (And Others Don't)
“Whenever a piece of information is stored in memory, additional information should be stored with it telling where to find the next (associated) piece of information. In this way the entire memory could be organized like a long string of beads, but with the individual beads of the string stored in arbitrary locations. ‘Nextness’ was not determined by physical propinquity but by an address, or pointer, stored with each item, showing where the associated item was located. Then a bead could be added to a string or omitted from a string simply by changing a pair of addresses, without disturbing the rest of the memory.”
— Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life(MIT Press)
Tagged: AI Associative Learning, Metaphors
“Some speak of search for their roots. But that is a false metaphor. For these strands that we trace backward through time have no root tips. Each ancestral name and date we identify points back toward two more still hidden in the mists, and behind each of these, yet another pair. The mists that hide the distant past are no less dense, no less impenetrable, than those that shroud the future.”
— Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life(MIT Press)
Tagged: Roots, Groundless Ground, The Past Is As Murky As The Future
“The past cannot be recaptured. Memory is overlaid with later memory, mangled by self-justification and self-pity, guarded by self-interest, rent by great gaps of forgetfulness.”
— Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life(MIT Press)
Tagged: Memory, autobiography, Historical Fiction, What Happens To Memory, Quote of the Moment
“Since biological organisms are constructed from molecules, and those molecules from atoms, and the atoms from elementary particles — all obeying the laws of quantum mechanics — it might even be argued that research on human organizations is merely a rather baroque branch of physics.”
— Herbert A. Simon, Hierarchy Theory: The Challenge of Complex Systems
Tagged: Biology, Baroque Physics, Conditional Compartmentalization
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