Brian Christian Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Maybe people are finally tiring of watered down grunge rock on the radio.
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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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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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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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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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You can't be both a painter and a musician and master anything. You can't. And live a life.
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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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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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Unless we have good reason to think otherwise, it seems that our best guide to the future is a mirror image of the past. The nearest thing to clairvoyance is to assume that history repeats itself — backward.
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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.
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The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades.
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I am a musician before a writer, and a drawer before a writer. When I lose sight of that, which I do, my work tends to suffer.
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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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Indeed, as Peter Whittle recounts, during World War II efforts to solve the question “so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts … that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage.
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Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of My Dinner with Andre is “Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory eat dinner.” The entire plot of Before Sunrise is “Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around Vienna.” But the dialogue takes us everywhere, and as Roger Ebert notes, of My Dinner with Andre, these films may be paradoxically among the most visually stimulating in the history of the cinema...
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When the future is foggy, it turns out you don't need a calendar -- just a to-do list.
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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.