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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.
Brian Christian -
When the future is foggy, it turns out you don't need a calendar -- just a to-do list.
Brian Christian
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Want to calculate the chance your bus is late? The chance your softball team will win? Count the number of times it has happened in the past plus one, then divide by the number of opportunities plus two. And the beauty of Laplace’s Law is that it works equally well whether we have a single data point or millions of them.
Brian Christian -
We go through digital life, in the twenty-first century, with our guards up. All communication is a Turing test. All communication is suspect.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
One of the chief goals of design ought to be protecting people from unnecessary tension, friction, and mental labor.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian
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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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
After all, the whole time you’re searching for a secretary, you don’t have a secretary. What’s more, you’re spending the day conducting interviews instead of getting your own work done.
Brian Christian -
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...
Brian Christian -
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. Forgive, but don’t forget. To thine own self be true.
Brian Christian
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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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian -
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.
Brian Christian
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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.
Brian Christian -
Maybe people are finally tiring of watered down grunge rock on the radio.
Brian Christian -
Put broadly, the object of study in mathematics is truth; the object of study in computer science is complexity.
Brian Christian -
Service works by the gradual buildup of sympathy through failed attempted solutions.
Brian Christian