A Quote by Herbert Simon

A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted. — © Herbert Simon
A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.
Across the continent, on the shores of small tributaries, in the shadows of sacred mountains, on the vast expanse of the prairies, or in the safety of the woods, prayers are being repeated, as they have for thousands of years, and common people with uncommon courage and the whispers of their ancestors in their ears continue their struggles to protect the land and water and trees on which their very existence is based. And like small tributaries joining together to form a mighty river, their force and power grows.
There is one river of Truth which receives tributaries from every side.
The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
This ego business has come from various sources, you know that, but it has to be cleansed out. Like when the river flows all kinds of dirt, filth flows into it, but when it meets the sea it becomes the sea. In the same way you have to become that. To become the sea what you have to do is to forget all these tributaries which were coming into you, and all these wrong ideas which came to you.
The study of an idea is, of necessity, the story of many things. Ideas, like large rivers, never have just one source. Just as the water of a river near its mouth, in its final form, is composed largely of many tributaries, so an idea, in its final form, is composed largely of later additions.
What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
Clearly we're in historic times here. We have - one of the tributaries of the Mississippi River is a river called the Merrimack. And the crest areas there - they're going to be a number of feet, 2, 3, 4, over what they were in '93 or '82. And on the Mississippi River itself, down below St. Louis, we're still projecting a couple of feet over that historic number. So the bottom line is there's a significant amount of water that's causing evacuations and challenges throughout that whole area.
Just as the water of a river near its mouth, in its final form, is composed largely of many tributaries, so an idea, in its final form, is composed largely of later additions.
Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . .
The great river follows its own course before joining the vast sea. Likewise, the soul follows equally varied routes and passes through different stages, receiving here and there tributaries of knowledge, strengthening its personality and perfecting its qualities before reaching the Ocean of Eternal Wisdom.
The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
The software is the strength of the electronic tribe because it's networking. It's creating oneness. It's creating tributaries that link together into a singular river.
With us, when you speak of ‘the river,’ though there be many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting, unappeasable god of the country, feared and loved the Mississippi.
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