“Computer scientists have been working on finding this balance for more than fifty years. They even have a name for it: the… — Brian Christian Computers Copy Share Image
“And it’s actually rational to emphasize exploration—the new rather than the best, the exciting rather than the safe, the random rather than… — Brian Christian Exploration Copy Share Image
“there are two ways you can fail: stopping early and stopping late” — Brian Christian Failure Copy Share Image
“And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask… — Brian Christian Conversation Copy Share Image
“high-demand items are placed in a different area, more quickly accessible than the rest. That area is Amazon’s cache.” — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
Conceptual art might be, for better or worse, (definable as) the art most susceptible to lossy compression. — Brian Christian Art Copy Share Image
“your total amount of regret will probably never stop increasing, even if you pick the best possible strategy” — Brian Christian Regret Copy Share Image
“The biggest purchaser of kale the year before had been Pizza Hut, which put it in their salad bars—as decoration” — Brian Christian Food Copy Share Image
“Don’t always consider all your options. Don’t necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time.” — Brian Christian Choice Copy Share Image
“heuristic that favors simpler answers—with fewer factors, or less computation—offers precisely these “less is more” — Brian Christian Heuristic Copy Share Image
“Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief… — Brian Christian Chess Copy Share Image
“If changing strategies doesn’t help, you can try to change the game. And if that’s not possible, you can at least exercise… — Brian Christian Game-theory Copy Share Image
“How do we connect meaningfully with each other, as meaningfully as possible, within the limits of language and time? How does empathy… — Brian Christian Empathy Copy Share Image
“One of the implicit principles of computer science, as odd as it may sound, is that computation is bad: the underlying directive… — Brian Christian Computation Copy Share Image
“Unless we’re willing to spend eons striving for perfection every time we encounter a hitch, hard problems demand that instead of spinning… — Brian Christian Easier Copy Share Image
“To get a better sense for these findings, we talked to UC Riverside’s Amnon Rapoport, who has been running optimal stopping experiments… — Brian Christian Science Copy Share Image
“Computer scientists would call this a “ping attack” or a “denial of service” attack: give a system an overwhelming number of trivial… — Brian Christian Important things Copy Share Image
“I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design… — Brian Christian Books Copy Share Image
“Many of my all-time favorite movies are almost entirely verbal. The entire plot of My Dinner with Andre is “Wallace Shawn and… — Brian Christian Cinema Copy Share Image
“Simply put, the representation of events in the media does not track their frequency in the world. As sociologist Barry Glassner notes,… — Brian Christian Gun violence Copy Share Image
“Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could… — Brian Christian Books Copy Share Image
“When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and… — Brian Christian Children Copy Share Image
“To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one… — Brian Christian Real world Copy Share Image
“When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity… — Brian Christian Consiousness Copy Share Image
