Brian Christian Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Sometimes there’s so much that needs to be said that the literal site disappears, becomes, as in My Dinner with Andre...
-
We can hope to be fortunate—but we should strive to be wise.
-
Computational kindness isn’t just a principle of behavior; it’s also a design principle.
-
But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 …
-
The number of robberies you should carry out is roughly equal to the chance you get away, divided by the chance you get caught.
-
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.
-
Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.
-
And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living.