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
My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.
J. M. Coetzee
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
Still, intuitive assumptions about behavior is only the starting point of systematic analysis, for alone they do not yield many interesting implications.
Gary Becker
There are three ways to correct our faults:We can change through behavior We can change through understanding We can change heart.
Gautama Buddha
Romance is a bird that will not sing in every bush, and love-affairs, however devoted the sentiments that inspire them, are often so business-like in the prudence with which they are conducted, that romance is reduced to a mere croaking or a disgusted silence.
E. F. Benson
I just encourage young girls to be true to themselves.
Michelle Carter
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
