Brian Christian Quotes
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You can't be both a painter and a musician and master anything. You can't. And live a life.
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The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades.
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As Trick points out, sports leagues aren’t concerned with determining the rankings as quickly and expeditiously as possible. Instead, sports calendars are explicitly designed to maintain tension throughout the season, something that has rarely been a concern of sorting theory.
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So explore when you will have time to use the resulting knowledge, exploit when you’re ready to cash in. The interval makes the strategy.
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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.
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Unless we’re willing to spend eons striving for perfection every time we encounter a hitch, hard problems demand that instead of spinning our tires we imagine easier versions and tackle those first. When applied correctly, this is not just wishful thinking, not fantasy or idle daydreaming. It’s one of our best ways of making progress.
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As Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert puts it, our future selves often “pay good money to remove the tattoos that we paid good money to get.
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Everything starts to break down, however, when a species gains language. What we talk about isn’t what we experience—we speak chiefly of interesting things, and those tend to be things that are uncommon.
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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.
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What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and again- to actually be human with other humans, so maddeningly much of the time.
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During abusive conversations each remark after the first is only about the previous remark. -- Verbal abuse is less complex than other forms of conversation! "Aware of their stateless, knee-jerk character, I recognize that the terse remark I want to blurt has far more to do with some kind of "reflex" to the very last sentence of the conversation than it does with either the actual issue at hand or the person I'm talking to. . . . I steer myself toward a more "stateful" response.
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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.
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Learning self-control is important, but it’s equally important to grow up in an environment where adults are consistently present and trustworthy.
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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.
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What’s more, sports are not, of course, always designed strictly to minimize the number of games. Without remembering this, some aspects of sports scheduling would otherwise seem mysterious to a computer scientist.
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To get a better sense for these findings, we talked to UC Riverside’s Amnon Rapoport, who has been running optimal stopping experiments in the laboratory for more than forty years...
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Bayes’s Rule tells us that when it comes to making predictions based on limited evidence, few things are as important as having good priors—that is, a sense of the distribution from which we expect that evidence to have come. Good predictions thus begin with having good instincts about when we’re dealing with a normal distribution and when with a power-law distribution. As it turns out, Bayes’s Rule offers us a simple but dramatically different predictive rule of thumb for each.
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Don’t always consider all your options. Don’t necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time. Make a mess on occasion. Travel light. Let things wait. Trust your instincts and don’t think too long. Relax. Toss a coin.
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We go through digital life, in the twenty-first century, with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test. All communication is suspect.
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In 2010 and 2015, the FDA released a pair of draft guidance documents on Adaptive Design clinical trials for drugs and medical devices, which suggests—despite a long history of sticking to an option they trust—that they might at last be willing to explore alternatives.
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Put broadly, the object of study in mathematics is truth; the object of study in computer science is complexity.
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Even the best strategy sometimes yields bad results—which is why computer scientists take care to distinguish between “process” and “outcome.” If you followed the best possible process, then you’ve done all you can, and you shouldn’t blame yourself if things didn’t go your way.
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In fact, for any possible drawing of winning tickets in attempts, the expectation is simply the number of wins plus one, divided by the number of attempts plus two: (w+1)⁄(n+2).
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Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.