Quotes About Consequences

The problem is our ignorance. We have to own up to it. We're the species that, in the New Mexican desert in 1945, wondered if our new experiment might ignite the atmosphere and incinerate the Earth. We discussed it and thought it unlikely, but we could not be certain. Yet we went ahead and exploded the first atomic bomb anyway.

Only then does he realize what he has done to Mirabelle, how wanting a square inch of her and not all of her has damaged them both, and how he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life.

Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events.

for divorce. You don't kill to prevent things you don't know about. His

In ACT, values are freely chosen, verbally constructed consequences of ongoing, dynamic, evolving patterns of activity, which establish predominant reinforcers for that activity that are intrinsic in engagement in the valued behavioral pattern itself

With any problem, it's important to figure out which incentives will actually work, not just what your moral compass tells you should work.

It was announced that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay $3 per child for each incident. The fee would be added to the parents' monthly bill, which was roughly $380. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went…up.

If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That's easy: in most cases, the cost of saying "I don't know" is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least for the individual.

Never, ever think that people will do something just because it is the "right" thing to do.

Steven D. Levitt

As we wrote earlier, the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence.

As with most bad behaviors, drunk driving could probably be wiped out entirely if a strong-enough incentive were instituted—random roadblocks, for instance, where drunk drivers are executed on the spot—but our society probably doesn't have the appetite for that.

Politicians have all sorts of reasons to pass all sorts of laws that, as well-meaning as they may be, fail to account for the way real people respond to real-world incentives.

As the Inuits say, "Gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs.

Un choque de automóvil es un asunto violento, y pueden sucederle muchas cosas terribles a una masa de carne y hueso que se desplace a gran velocidad dentro de un objeto metálico y pesado que se para de repente.

When people, especially politicians, start making decisions based on a reading of their moral compass, facts tend to be among the first casualties.

When bad predictions are unpunished, what incentive is there to stop making them?

Cuando a la gente no se la obliga a pagar todos los costes de sus acciones, tiene pocos incentivos para cambiar de conducta.

What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and very weak incentives forever after (and presumably work much less hard on average as a consequence).

One of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences.

there is one mantra a Freak lives by, it is this: people respond to incentives. As utterly obvious as this point may seem, we are amazed at how frequently people forget it, and how often it leads to their undoing. Understanding the incentives of all the players in a given scenario is a fundamental step in solving any problem.

But if you want to think like a Freak, you must learn to be a master of incentives—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.

People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictor manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences." ??SuperFreakonomics??