Responsibilities of Competence - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 191

Responsibilities of Competence*
HEINZ vON FOERSTER
Biological Computer Laboratory, University of Illinois
At our last Annual Symposium I submitted to you a theorem to which
Stafford Beer referred on another occasion as “Heinz Von Foerster's
Theorem Number One”. As some of you may remember, it went as follows:
“The more profound the problem that is ignored, the greater are the chances for
fame and success.”
Building on a tradition of a single instance, I shall again submit a theorem
which, in all modesty, I shall call “Heinz Von Foerster's Theorem Number
Two”. It goes as follows:
“The hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; the soft
sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.”