Brian Christian Quotes
-
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.
-
The Gittins index, then, provides a formal, rigorous justification for preferring the unknown, provided we have some opportunity to exploit the results of what we learn from exploring.
-
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...
-
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.
-
The satirical Peter Principle, articulated in the 1960s by education professor Laurence J. Peter, states that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” The idea is that in a hierarchical organization, anyone doing a job proficiently will be rewarded with a promotion into a new job that may involve more complex and/or different challenges. When the employee finally reaches a role in which they don’t perform well, their march up the ranks will stall, and they will remain in that role for the rest of their...
-
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.
-
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.
-
Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... 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.
-
To live in a restless world requires a certain restlessness in oneself. So long as things continue to change, you must never fully cease exploring.
-
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).
-
One of the chief goals of design ought to be protecting people from unnecessary tension, friction, and mental labor.
-
At first glance it would seem, of course, that no two subjects could possibly be further apart than an underground society of pickup artists and supercomputer chess. What on earth do these two narratives have to do with each other—and what do they have to do with asserting myself as human in the Turing test? The answer is surprising, and it hinges on what chess players call “getting out of book.” We’ll look at what that means in chess and in conversation, how to make it happen, and what the consequences are if you don’t.
-
Why not simply allow them unlimited vacation? Anecdotal reports thus far are mixed—but from a game-theoretic perspective, this approach is a nightmare. All employees want, in theory, to take as much vacation as possible. But they also all want to take just slightly less vacation than each other, to be perceived as more loyal, more committed, and more dedicated (hence more promotion-worthy). Everyone looks to the others for a baseline, and will take just slightly less than that. The Nash equilibrium of this game is zero. As the CEO of software company Travis CI, Mathias Meyer, writes, “People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Service works by the gradual buildup of sympathy through failed attempted solutions.
-
If you want to be a good intuitive Bayesian—if you want to naturally make good predictions, without having to think about what kind of prediction rule is appropriate—you need to protect your priors. Counterintuitively, that might mean turning off the news.
-
The math shows that you should always keep playing. But if you follow this strategy, you will eventually lose everything. Some problems are better avoided than solved.
-
This procedure focuses on decisively resolving the question of which treatment is better, rather than on providing the best treatment to each patient in the trial itself.
-
To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.
-
When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ball-point pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They’re too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn’t worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus. A Sharpie makes it impossible to drill down that deep. You can only draw shapes, lines, and boxes. That’s good. The big picture is all you should be worrying about in the beginning.
-
Learning the structure of the world around us and forming lasting social relationships are both lifelong tasks.
-
You should be excited to meet new people and try new things—to assume the best about them, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.
-
Existence without essence is very stressful.