Quotes About Unintended

She could still hear Siuan going on about what she called the Law of Unintended Consequences, stronger than any written law. Whether or not what you do has the effect you want, it will have three at least you never expected, and one of those usually unpleasant.

It's complicated...Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns... We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.

The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.

Metric fixation is the persistence of these beliefs despite their unintended negative consequences when they are put into practice.6 It occurs because not everything that is important is measureable, and much that is measurable is unimportant.

Given the reality of unintended parenthood and parental unhappiness, one would think that women and men who make the decision not to have children - who are deliberate and thoughtful about the choice to bring another person into the world - would be seen as less selfish than those who unthinkingly have children. Yet the stigma remains.

Smash the right two particles together in the right way and you get a bomb. That's us, Dex. Accidental fusion.

There was always something going on in the background—some plotting or mulling over some slight or lack of attention, quite unintended, of course, but noted and filed away for subsequent scrutiny. And much of the time men would be unaware of it, until it all came out in a torrent of recrimination and tears.

Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents—preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our "solutions" have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.

She'd begun her story to divert him from his nightmare. Little did she know that what she described created its own nightmares.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

James Reason reminds us, "Errors are largely unintentional. It is very difficult for management to control what people did not intend to do in the first place.

Automation does not simply supplant human activity but rather changes it, often in ways unintended and unanticipated by the designers. —Automation experts Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey, 2010

The DSMs have a mixed record. They have served an extremely valuable function in improving the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis and in encouraging a revolution in psychiatric research. But they have also had the very harmful unintended consequence of triggering and helping to maintain a runaway diagnostic inflation that threatens normal and results in massive overtreatment with psychiatric medication.

It went to show that no one knew, when they abandoned a thing, what misuses it would be put to later by others.

As an instance of an intended act, Napoleon emancipated the Jews; as an instance of an unintended act which manifested the "cunning of reason," Napoleon created German nationalism by the very act of abolishing the Holy Roman Empire.

Some of the most important discoveries that scientists have made were not what they were seeking at the time.

government interventions create unintended consequences that lead to calls for further intervention, and so on into a destructive spiral of more and more government control.

Our work is an ongoing struggle with unintended consequences. We must try to narrow the gap, which is sometimes a gulf, between what we intend and the results we achieve.

Even as Jacob unwittingly embraced a bride who was not his choice, with unhappy consequences, so well-meaning Christian thinkers have unknowingly reasoned on premises they assumed to be Christian.

Their mothers had finally caught up to them and been proven right. There were consequences after all but they were the consequences to things you didn't even know you'd done.

The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment - the way it always was, Crake would have said - and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.

Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.

There is no question but that when one is engaged militarily that there are going to be unintended loss of life.

New Zealand needs to balance its environmental responsibilities with its economic opportunities, because the risk is that if you don't do that - and you want to lead the world - then you might end up getting unintended consequences.