Brian Christian Quotes
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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.
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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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Sorting something that you will never search is a complete waste; searching something you never sorted is merely inefficient.
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Computational kindness isn’t just a principle of behavior; it’s also a design principle.
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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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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 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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We can hope to be fortunate—but we should strive to be wise.
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And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living.
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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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Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.
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While everyone has a unique way to get motivated and stay that way, all athletes thrive on competition, and that means beating someone else, not just setting a personal best … We all work harder, run faster, when we know someone is right on our heels …