Austan Goolsbee Quotes

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

Basic research is very useful, but it should be more geared toward application than it was before.

If you're a physicist, for heaven's sake, and here is the experiment, and you have a theory, and the theory doesn't agree with the experiment, then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.

A scientist... must accept the results of experiment, and nothing but the results of experiment.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.

I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.

Every day we go over data and use science and data to drive policy and decision-making.

I will never speculate on data. I always need to see data.

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

Personally, I don't deal much in theory. I have to deal with the facts. And on the basis of facts, I don't see much difference in the behavior of men and women.

Theory can leave questions unanswered, but practice has to come up with something.

Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.

The only way to know something absolutely is to experience it for yourself; anything less is theory, speculation, and belief. .

The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning process.

The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple indeterminate, relative ones.

You know economists; they're the sort of people who see something works in practice and wonder if it would work in theory.

I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.

As in the experimental sciences, truth cannot be distinguished from error as long as firm principles have not been established through the rigorous observation of facts.

Quantitative methods are no more synonymous with objectivity than qualitative methods are synonymous with subjectivity.