“[The goal of efficiency was] a system in which all relevant information would be available to each research worker in an amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance.”

— John Desmond Bernal

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 249

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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John Desmond Bernal 22

British scientist 1901–1971

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

The Structure of Information Retrieval Systems (1959)

“Each element in the system is ignorant of the behaviour of the system as a whole, it responds only to information that is available to it locally… If each element 'knew' what was happening to the system as a whole, all of the complexity would have to be present in that element.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Source: Complexity and Postmodernism (1998), p. 4-5; as cited in: Peter Buirski, ‎Amanda Kottler (2007) New Developments in Self Psychology Practice http://books.google.nl/books?id=PinroXBLDkIC&pg=PA9, p. 9

“A relevant notion of efficiency must refer to scarcity and people as they are, not as they could be.”

Harold Demsetz (1930–2019) American economist

Cited in: Eggertsson (1990; 22)
"Information and Efficiency: Another Viewpoint." (1969)

“The state of segmentation of the organizational system into subsystems, each of which tends to develop particular attributes in relation to the requirements posed by its relevant external environment. Differentiation, as used here, includes the behavioral attributes of members of organizational subsystems.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration, 1967, p. 4

“[The environment of a system is] a set of elements and their relevant properties, which elements are not part of the system, but a change in any of which can cause or produce a change in the state of the system.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

1970s, Towards a System of Systems Concepts, 1971

“You should look at all the experimental information at hand, not only the most relevant, and be prepared to make conjectures if that helps.”

Hans Bethe (1906–2005) German-American nuclear physicist

as quoted by Edwin E. Salpeter in My Sixty Years with Hans Bethe, in an edition by [Gerald Edward Brown, Chang-Hwan Lee, Hans Bethe and his physics, World Scientific, 2006, 9812566090, 119–120]

“Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.”

Gregory Benford book Timescape

Source: Timescape (1980), Chapter 14 (p. 182, known as Benford's law of controversy)
Context: It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

“Running an organisation… generates problems, which have no necessary (and often an opposed) relationship to the professed or "original" goals of the organization. The day-to-day behaviour of the group becomes centered around specific problems and proximate goals, which have primarily an internal relevance. Then, since these activities come to consume an increasing proportion of the time and thoughts of participants, they are-from the point of view of actual behaviour – substituted for the professed goal.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: "An Approach to a Theory of Bureaucracy," 1943, p. 48; as cited in: Owen A. Jones. The Sources of Goal Incongruence in a Public Service Network. 2013. p. 23

“A root definition describing a notional system chosen for its relevance to what the investigator and/or people in the problem situation perceive as matters of contention.”

Peter Checkland (1930) British management scientist

Source: Systems thinking, systems practice: includes a 30-year retrospective, 1999, p. 319 cited in: Raymond W. Y. Kao (2010) Sustainable Economy. p. 411

“I hope anyone, especially Lee Bo himself, can provide relevant information.”

Leung Chun-ying (1954) Hong Kong politician

Source: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2016/01/05/cy-urges-missing-bookseller-to-come-forward-after-alleged-letter-emerges-investigation-continues/
Source: 林榮基子：警拒透露父離境紀錄警曾稱林已報平安不再查「好似唔想跟」, Ming Pao http://news.mingpao.com/pns/dailynews/web_tc/article/20160106/s00001/1452017341286,

“[The goal of efficiency was] a system in which all relevant information would be available to each research worker in an amplitude proportional to its degree of relevance.”

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