Science Quote by Herbert Simon

Simon’s line is a tidy pin to a balloon that keeps re-inflating: the fantasy that raw computing power will dissolve the messiness of reality. It sounds like a simple scale comparison, but the subtext is epistemic humility. Computers can get “big and fast,” yet the world is not a dataset waiting to be chewed; it’s a shifting, adversarial, feedback-riddled system that changes in response to being measured, predicted, and optimized.

Coming from Simon, this isn’t Luddite suspicion of machines. It’s the worldview of the scientist who coined “bounded rationality” and spent a career studying how decision-makers cope with complexity. The jab lands because it targets a perennial technocratic mistake: treating intelligence as brute-force calculation rather than as selective attention under constraints. If the world outpaces any model, the winning strategy isn’t endless computation; it’s choosing what to ignore, building heuristics, and designing institutions and interfaces that help humans make tolerable decisions with partial information.

Context matters: Simon worked through the early era of AI and management science, when optimism about computers ran hot and the temptation was to equate faster machines with better governance, forecasting, even cognition itself. His sentence pushes back on the “just add compute” ideology that still animates everything from economic models to contemporary AI hype. The wit is in the deflation: you can always buy a bigger computer; you can’t buy a smaller world.