Education Quote by Herbert Simon

Rationality, in Herbert Simon's world, is never a heroic state of mind. It's a scarce resource you can sometimes buy with information, if you spend it well. "Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational" sounds like a tidy Enlightenment slogan, but the operative word is "opportunity" - not guarantee. Simon, the patron saint of bounded rationality, is quietly puncturing the fantasy that humans naturally upgrade their beliefs when facts arrive. Knowledge doesn't perfect us; it opens a door we may still fail to walk through.

The line also contains Simon's characteristic managerial realism. New knowledge is framed as an input that can improve decision-making under constraint, not as an abstract good. In a world of limited attention, time, and computational capacity, information is only useful when it changes the choice set or clarifies tradeoffs. Otherwise, it becomes noise - or worse, a justification engine for what we wanted to do anyway.

Context matters: Simon worked at the seam between economics, psychology, and early AI, watching models of "rational agents" collide with actual human cognition. The subtext is a rebuke to both camps: to romantics who think intuition is enough, and to technocrats who assume more data automatically yields better governance. He offers a thinner, more honest promise: learning can make rationality possible, but it still requires discipline, institutions, and habits that convert knowledge into judgment.