Brian Christian Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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...
-
Learning self-control is important, but it’s equally important to grow up in an environment where adults are consistently present and trustworthy.
-
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.
-
You can't be both a painter and a musician and master anything. You can't. And live a life.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Put broadly, the object of study in mathematics is truth; the object of study in computer science is complexity.
-
We go through digital life, in the twenty-first century, with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test. All communication is suspect.
-
Maybe people are finally tiring of watered down grunge rock on the radio.
-
Some of the biggest challenges faced by computers and human minds alike: how to manage finite space, finite time, limited attention, unknown unknowns, incomplete information, and an unforeseeable future; how to do so with grace and confidence; and how to do so in a community with others who are all simultaneously trying to do the same.