“the math tells us why: the unknown has a chance of being better” — Brian Christian Chance Copy Share Image
“Searcher, there is no road. We make the road by walking.” — Brian Christian Journey 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
“The big picture is all you should be worrying about in the beginning” — Brian Christian Beginning Copy Share Image
“When balancing favorite experiences and new ones, nothing matters as much as the interval over which we plan to enjoy them.” — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
“heuristic that favors simpler answers—with fewer factors, or less computation—offers precisely these “less is more” — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
“When the future is foggy, it turns out you don’t need a calendar—just a to-do list.” — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
“One of the chief goals of design ought to be protecting people from unnecessary tension, friction, and mental labor.” — Brian Christian Design 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
“Put broadly, the object of study in mathematics is truth; the object of study in computer science is complexity.” — Brian Christian Complexity 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
“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
“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
“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
“What a familiarity with the construction of Turing test bots had begun to show me was that we fail - again and… — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
To be human is to be a human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial… — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
“Forrest Gander: "Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see… — Brian Christian Attention 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
“Even the best strategy sometimes yields bad results—which is why computer scientists take care to distinguish between “process” and “outcome.” If you… — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
“The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy,… — Brian Christian Copy Share Image
“Though all Christians start a wedding invitation by solemnly declaring their marriage is due to special Divine arrangement, I, as a philosopher,… — Brian Christian Christianity Copy Share Image
Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of… — Brian Christian 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 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
“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
“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
“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 I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity… — Brian Christian 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
“Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount… — Brian Christian Data 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
“It’s fairly intuitive that never exploring is no way to live. But it’s also worth mentioning that never exploiting can be every… — Brian Christian Computer science 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
“But any distrust regarding the analogy-based approach would soon vanish: at IBM, Kirkpatrick and Gelatt’s simulated annealing algorithms started making better chip… — Brian Christian Optimization Copy Share Image