Brian Christian Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades.
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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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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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The New York Times reported in June 2010—in an article titled “The End of the Best Friend...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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So explore when you will have time to use the resulting knowledge, exploit when you’re ready to cash in.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Put broadly, the object of study in mathematics is truth; the object of study in computer science is complexity.
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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.