Brian Christian Quotes
To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one another’s behavior to estimate an item’s value, look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control.
Brian Christian
Quotes to Explore
I constantly remind people that crime isn't solved by technology; it's solved by people.
Patricia Cornwell
I would watch anything with Meryl Streep in it.
Olivia De Havilland
When people are like, 'What do you think of this vampire craze?' - well, I don't really feel like it ever ended, personally, 'cause I've always been into them, like 'Underworld.'
Kat Graham
The claim that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked because fundamentalists hate our prosperity and freedom is a ridiculous lie.
L. Neil Smith
You'll hear 'Hippie,' or, 'Get a haircut.' I like it. I think it's funny because they think we've never heard that before. So, like, good one.
Jacob deGrom
If you're going to give people authority and hold them responsible and ultimately accountable for their performance, you've got to get out of the way.
Randy Lerner
Millennials are a very interesting generation for a lot of reasons. They're absolutely adorable, but they have some significant challenges. Their lives and their careers are delayed by about 10 years, partly because of the recession, also because of technology and also because of the way that they approach things.
Dana Perino
You could make a case that women addicted men to their sexuality and then withdrew their sexuality until we provided them with a source of income.
Warren Farrell
There are a lot of people who will tell you I'm very ruthless. I'm very fierce. If I feel I'm right, if I feel I've been violated, then I am like a warrior from hell!
George C. Wolfe
The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
Irving Howe
Don't reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008, we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune, we called it a 'moral hazard,' because the bailout absolved the bank's bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again.
Eliot Spitzer
For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we'll have more storms - it's how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.
Naomi Klein
Life is not being sure what will come next or how it will come. We guess at everything we do. We take leap after leap in the dark and that's the joy of living and the beauty of faith. When we grow tired, when we sit still, that's when we begin to die.... One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
Angela Elwell Hunt
After the '57 initial meeting - I was up this way working, not as a staff person - there became the need for a much more definite organized office. What you'd had prior to that time were these big meetings in different places, and there was nobody to pull anything together. Everything was left to [Martin Luther] King and the group that was around him.
Ella Baker
The bottom line is, the more we have a cadre of women moving up the scale, and it doesn't seem threatening, and people realize that women actually work much harder than men, and realize that they need more women in these jobs, I think that goes away.
Madeleine Albright
To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one another’s behavior to estimate an item’s value, look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control.
Brian Christian
