Andrew Gelman Quotes
People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

Quotes to Explore
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Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.
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At what point is someone precluded from availing themselves of the justification of self-defense because of their own poor judgment or bad behavior?
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You lose your habitual behavior, which allowed you to sort of zone out. You have to be here, you have to be now, you have to be present.
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If someone is not treating you in a way that you like, remember that there are so many nice people out there. The problem is that when you love someone, you make excuses for that kind of behavior.
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I don't think that somebody who is observing or predicting behavior should also be participating in the 'experiment.'
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The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
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Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations.
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It is actually the neuroscientists and evolutionists who do the best job of explaining the reasons behind the most unreasonable behavior.
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I have made hundreds of dives in submersibles, with each dive holding the promise of seeing an organism or a behavior that no one has ever seen before. But I have always wondered about the animals and behaviors that we're not seeing because our bright lights and loud thrusters scare them away.
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Enzymologists usually study the initial rates of reactions measuring product formation as a function of substrate concentration or other variable. Cell biologists are more likely to want to know the effect of a change on the steady state behavior of a complex system.
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All forms of self-defeating behavior are unseen and unconscious, which is why their existence is denied.
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Beauty set up distance between other people and me. It warped their behavior.
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Genocide is an attempt to exterminate a people, not to alter their behavior.
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In some ways we live in a world where things appear to be very logical, very rational, and mechanical aspects of our world are rather scientific and rather straightforward.
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People don't change at their core. If you're a good person, you are a good person. What changes is our behavior.
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Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.
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The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.
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This script was just so much smarter than usual and I'm just fascinated by human behavior.
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The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view. It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.
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Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.
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The biggest fear that I have is settling into too many set behavior patterns, where I feel like I'm no longer exploring possibilities anymore.
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Attempted murder should carry the same penalty as first-degree murder. Otherwise, you're simply rewarding incompetence.
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I haven't seen too many American distance men on the international scene willing to take risks. I saw some U.S. women in Barcelona willing to risk, more than men. The Kenyans risk. Steve Prefontaine risked. I risked - I went through the first half of the Tokyo race just a second off my best 5000 time.
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People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.