Brian Christian Quotes
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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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To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.
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Maybe people are finally tiring of watered down grunge rock on the radio.
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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...
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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.
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Service works by the gradual buildup of sympathy through failed attempted solutions.
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Learning the structure of the world around us and forming lasting social relationships are both lifelong tasks.
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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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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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The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades.
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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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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.
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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.
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Sorting something that you will never search is a complete waste; searching something you never sorted is merely inefficient.
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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.
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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.
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Existence without essence is very stressful.
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One of the chief goals of design ought to be protecting people from unnecessary tension, friction, and mental labor.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The ancient Egyptian mummification process involved, for instance, preserving all of a person’s organs except the brain—thought to be useless—which they scrambled with hooks into a custard and scooped out through the nose.
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Sometimes mess is more than just the easy choice - it's the optimal choice.