Brian Christian Quotes
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Service works by the gradual buildup of sympathy through failed attempted solutions.
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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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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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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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Sometimes mess is more than just the easy choice - it's the optimal choice.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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 …
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Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.