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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We were intrigued by the fact that we had so much actual behavior among people on our dating site, OKCupid.
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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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Everyone has values; even criminal gangs have values. Values govern people's behavior but principles govern the consequences of those behaviors.
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The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.
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Vision, even for a dragon, is woefully unreliable. What you can see with great clarity may not be real; what you cannot see may be the ultimate reality.
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The cellphone is humanity's biggest platform. If we can't use it to change education or health care, then shame on us.
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I am an indie kid. I made no bones about the fact that I fell into DJing electronic music by accident, by a lucky break, but it doesn't make me any less of a fan of that music, I just never envisaged... not through a lack of confidence or belief, I just didn't think that I'd be sharing the bill with people that I was going out to see myself.
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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.
