Time & Perspective Quote by Herbert Simon

Simon smuggles a cool provocation into a folksy contrast: the problem with humanity is not that we are irrational, but that our rationality is conditional on what we can know, measure, and control. The line pivots on the move from "rain dances" to "seeding clouds" a deliberately cheeky swap that frames modern technique as the inheritor of ancient desire. We never stopped trying to make it rain; we just upgraded the story we tell ourselves about why our actions might work.

The subtext is pure Simon: bounded rationality. People can look "more rational" when the environment supplies better feedback loops, instruments, and institutions. A rain dance isn't merely ignorance; it's a technology of meaning and coordination in a world where causality is opaque. Cloud seeding, by contrast, signals the modern faith that uncertainty can be engineered down, not by wisdom but by intervention. Simon isn't simply praising science; he's describing how knowledge reorganizes behavior by changing what counts as a plausible action.

Context matters: Simon came up through the mid-century boom in systems thinking, decision science, and management theory, when "rational" became a civic religion for bureaucracies, labs, and governments. His phrasing "from the word go" deflates grand narratives of enlightenment. Progress isn't a moral awakening; it's an iterative retooling of methods. The barb is that our rationality is less a virtue than a supply chain: give people better models, and they'll act smarter. Starve them of it, and they'll dance.