Brian Christian Quotes
-
When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the 'charms of music and female chit-chat.' Against marriage he listed the 'terrible loss of time,' lack of freedom to go where he wished, the burden of visiting relatives, the expense and anxiety provoked by children, the concern that 'perhaps my wife won't like London,' and having less money to spend on books. Weighing one column against the other produced a narrow margin of victory, and at the bottom Darwin scrawled, 'Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.' Quod erat demonstrandum, the mathematical sign-off that Darwin himself restated in English: 'It being proved necessary to Marry.
-
They would randomly assign patients to either ECMO or the conventional treatment until a prespecified number of deaths was observed in one of the groups. Then they would switch all the patients in the study to the more effective treatment of the two.
-
Computer scientists would call this a ping attack or a “denial of service attack: give a system an overwhelming number of trivial things to do, and the important things get lost in the chaos.
-
The Upside of Heuristics The economist Harry Markowitz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics for developing modern portfolio theory: his groundbreaking “mean-variance portfolio optimization” showed how an investor could make an optimal allocation among various funds and assets to maximize returns at a given level of risk. So when it came time to invest his own retirement savings, it seems like Markowitz should have been the one person perfectly equipped for the job. What did he decide to do? I should have computed the historical covariances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead, I visualized my grief if the stock market went way up and I wasn’t in it—or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret. So I split my contributions fifty-fifty between bonds and equities. Why in the world would he do that?
-
As the applicant pool grows, the exact place to draw the line between looking and leaping settles to 37% of the pool, yielding the 37% Rule: look at the first 37% of the applicants, choosing none, then be ready to leap for anyone better than all those you’ve seen so far.
-
Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, definable as the art most susceptible to lossy compression.
-
Cobbled-together bits of human interaction do not a human relationship make. Not fifty one-night stands, not fifty speed dates, not fifty transfers through the bureaucratic pachinko. No more than sapling tied to sapling, oak though they may be, makes an oak.
-
What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us?
-
Searcher, there is no road. We make the road by walking.
-
From the mid-eighteenth century onward, computers, frequently women, were on the payrolls of corporations, engineering firms, and universities, performing calculations and doing numerical analysis, sometimes with the use of a rudimentary calculator.
-
When we talk about decision-making, we usually focus just on the immediate payoff of a single decision—and if you treat every decision as if it were your last, then indeed only exploitation makes sense. But over a lifetime, you’re going to make a lot of decisions. And it’s actually rational to emphasize exploration—the new rather than the best, the exciting rather than the safe, the random rather than the considered—for many of those choices, particularly earlier in life.
-
I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.
-
The most prevalent critique of modern communications is that we are “always connected.” But the problem isn’t that we’re always connected; we’re not. The problem is that we’re always buffered. The difference is enormous.
-
The patent talks about anticipatory package shipping, which the press seized upon as though Amazon could somehow mail you something before you bought it.
-
The word algorithm comes from the name of Persian mathematician al-Khwārizmī, author of a ninth-century book of techniques for doing mathematics by hand. The earliest known mathematical algorithms, however, predate even al-Khwārizmī’s work: a four-thousand-year-old Sumerian clay tablet found near Baghdad describes a scheme for long division.
-
It’s fairly intuitive that never exploring is no way to live. But it’s also worth mentioning that never exploiting can be every bit as bad. In the computer science definition, exploitation actually comes to characterize many of what we consider to be life’s best moments. A family gathering together on the holidays is exploitation. So is a bookworm settling into a reading chair with a hot cup of coffee and a beloved favorite, or a band playing their greatest hits to a crowd of adoring fans, or a couple that has stood the test of time dancing to “their song.
-
Meanwhile, the kale market grew by 40% in 2013 alone. The biggest purchaser of kale the year before had been Pizza Hut, which put it in their salad bars—as decoration.
-
How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy work? What is the process by which someone comes into our life and comes to mean something to us? These, to me, are the test’s most central questions—the most central questions of being human.
-
Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for “looking”—that is, exploring your options, gathering data—in which you categorically don’t choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the “leap” phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase.
-
Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.
-
Forrest Gander: "Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.
-
The old adage tells us that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but the math tells us why: the unknown has a chance of being better, even if we actually expect it to be no different, or if it’s just as likely to be worse.
-
It's really nice to have things to mail to people when they mail you things, or trade to people at shows. Something homemade, it feels... down to earth.
-
Thrashing is a very recognizable human state. If you've ever had a moment where you wanted to stop doing everything just to have the chance to write down everything you were supposed to be doing, but couldn't spare the time, you've thrashed.