Brian Christian Quotes
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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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Sometimes mess is more than just the easy choice - it's the optimal choice.
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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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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.
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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.
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Sometimes there’s so much that needs to be said that the literal site disappears, becomes, as in My Dinner with Andre...
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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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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.
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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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The number of robberies you should carry out is roughly equal to the chance you get away, divided by the chance you get caught.
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The physiologist Claude Bernard extended it to the realm of research, saying that one should not injure one person regardless of the benefits that might come to others. However, even avoiding harm requires learning what is harmful; and, in the process of obtaining this information, persons may be exposed to risk of harm.
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Giving yourself more time to decide about something does not necessarily mean that you'll make a better decision. But it does guarantee that you'll end up considering more factors, more hypotheticals, more pros and cons, and thus risk overfitting.
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And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living.
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Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.