Brian Christian Quotes
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Carpe diem,” urges Robin Williams in one of the most memorable scenes of the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. “Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” It’s incredibly important advice. It’s also somewhat self-contradictory. Seizing a day and seizing a lifetime are two entirely different endeavors.
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One day as a child, Brian was complaining to his mother about all the things he had to do: his homework, his chores.… “Technically, you don’t have to do anything,” his mother replied. “You don’t have to do what your teachers tell you. You don’t have to do what I tell you. You don’t even have to obey the law. There are consequences to everything, and you get to decide whether you want to face those consequences.” Brian’s kid-mind was blown. It was a powerful message, an awakening of a sense of agency, responsibility, moral judgment. It was something else, too: a powerful computational technique called Lagrangian Relaxation.
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If you want the best odds of getting the best apartment, spend 37% of your apartment hunt eleven days, if you’ve given yourself a month for the search noncommittally exploring options. Leave the checkbook at home; you’re just calibrating. But after that point, be prepared to immediately commit—deposit and all—to the very first place you see that beats whatever you’ve already seen. This is not merely an intuitively satisfying compromise between looking and leaping. It is the provably optimal solution.
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Perhaps the deepest insight that comes from thinking about later life as a chance to exploit knowledge acquired over decades is this: life should get better over time. What an explorer trades off for knowledge is pleasure.
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Journalists are martyrs, exploring so that others may exploit.
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Simply put, the representation of events in the media does not track their frequency in the world. As sociologist Barry Glassner notes, the murder rate in the United States declined by 20% over the course of the 1990s, yet during that time period the presence of gun violence on American news increased by 600%.
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Forgiveness The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga,” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.… Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.
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As Carl Sagan put it, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
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Computers can only do one thing: math. Fortunately for them, a shockingly high percentage of life can be translated into math...
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What this also suggests, intriguingly, is that the task of translating or writing literary novels cannot be broken into parts and done by a succession of different humans either—not by wikis, nor crowdsourcing, nor ghostwriters. Stability of point of view and consistency of style are too important. What’s truly strange, then, is the fact that we do seem to make a lot of art this way
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By the 2012 presidential election cycle, their company counted among its clients both the Obama re-election campaign and the campaign of Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
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Exponential Backoff was a huge part of the successful functioning of the ALOHAnet beginning in 1971, and in the 1980s it was baked into TCP, becoming a critical part of the Internet. All these decades later, it still is. As one influential paper puts it, “For a transport endpoint embedded in a network of unknown topology and with an unknown, unknowable and constantly changing population of competing conversations, only one scheme has any hope of working—exponential backoff.
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But any distrust regarding the analogy-based approach would soon vanish: at IBM, Kirkpatrick and Gelatt’s simulated annealing algorithms started making better chip layouts than the guru. Rather than keep mum about their secret weapon and become cryptic guru figures themselves, they published their method in a paper in Science, opening it up to others. Over the next few decades, that paper would be cited a whopping thirty-two thousand times. To this day, simulated annealing remains one of the most promising approaches to optimization problems known to the field.
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The same challenge also appears in an even more fraught setting: dating. Optimal stopping is the science of serial monogamy. Simple algorithms offer solutions not only to an apartment hunt but to all such situations in life where we confront the question of optimal stopping. People grapple witah these issues every day—although surely poets have spilled more ink on the tribulations of courtship than of parking—and they do so with, in some cases, considerable anguish. But the anguish is unnecessary. Mathematically, at least, these are solved problems. Every harried renter, driver, and suitor you see around you as you go through a typical week is essentially reinventing the wheel. They don’t need a therapist; they need an algorithm. The therapist tells them to find the right, comfortable balance between impulsivity and overthinking. The algorithm tells them the balance is thirty-seven percent.
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Stanford ecologist Deborah Gordon and computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar discovered that ants appear to have developed flow control algorithms millions of years before humans did.
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Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind or machine can ever face.
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Our judgments betray our expectations, and our expectations betray our experience. What we project about the future reveals a lot—about the world we live in, and about our own past.
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What horrified Hillis, unlike many a college undergraduate, wasn’t his roommate’s hygiene. It wasn’t that the roommate didn’t wash the socks; he did. The problem was what came next. The roommate pulled a sock out of the clean laundry hamper. Next he pulled another sock out at random. If it didn’t match the first one, he tossed it back in. Then he continued this process, pulling out socks one by one and tossing them back until he found a match for the first. With just 10 different pairs of socks, following this method will take on average 19 pulls merely to complete the first pair, and 17 more pulls to complete the second. In total, the roommate can expect to go fishing in the hamper 110 times just to pair 20 socks. It was enough to make any budding computer scientist request a room transfer.
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The more helpful our phones get, the harder it is to be ourselves. For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don't let them banalize you. Keep fighting.
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This approach, called Simulated Annealing, seemed like an intriguing way to map physics onto problem solving. But would it work? The initial reaction among more traditional optimization researchers was that this whole approach just seemed a little too … metaphorical. “I couldn’t convince math people that this messy stuff with temperatures, all this analogy-based stuff, was real,” says Kirkpatrick, “because mathematicians are trained to really distrust intuition.
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A utopian future where we shed our bodies and upload our minds into computers and live forever, virtual, immortal, disembodied. Heaven for hackers.
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When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.
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Taylor created a planning office, at the heart of which was a bulletin board displaying the shop's schedule for all to see. The board depicted every machine in the shop. showing the task currently being carried out by that machine and all the task waiting for it. This practice would be built upon by Taylor's colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century's most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System.
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Don’t always consider all your options. Don’t necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time. Make a mess on occasion. Travel light. Let things wait. Trust your instincts and don’t think too long. Relax. Toss a coin. Forgive, but don’t forget. To thine own self be true.