Brian Christian Quotes
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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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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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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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Sometimes mess is more than just the easy choice - it's the optimal choice.
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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 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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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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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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And if you’re just operating by habit, then you’re not really living.
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We can hope to be fortunate—but we should strive to be wise.
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Fragmentary humanity isn’t humanity.
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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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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 …