54 Quotes by Brian Christian

I think the reason novels are regarded to have so much more 'information' than films is that they outsource the scenic design and cinematography to the reader... This, for me, is a powerful argument for the value and potency of literature specifically. Movies don't demand as much from the player. Most people know this; at the end of the day you can be too beat to read but not yet too beat to watch television or listen to music.

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.

If meaning lies even partially in usage, then you subtly alter the language every time you use it. You couldn't leave it intact if you tried.

In memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, 'To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have bee.

Unless we have good reason to think otherwise, it seems that our best guide to the future is a mirror image of the past. The nearest thing to clairvoyance is to assume that history repeats itself — backward.

You should be excited to meet new people and try new things—to assume the best about them, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.

Over a lifetime, you’re going to make a lot of decisions. And it’s actually rational to emphasize exploration—the new rather than the best, the exciting rather than the safe, the random rather than the considered—for many of those choices, particularly earlier in life.

[The study of prime numbers] becoming pivotal in cryptography and online security. As it happens, it is much easier to multiply primes together than to factor them back out. In modern encryption, secret primes known only to the sender and recipient get multiplied together to create huge composite numbers that can be transmitted publicly without fear, since factoring the product would take eavesdropper way too long to be worth attempting.

.. requests for elaboration, like "In what sense?" and "How so?" turn out to be crushingly difficult for many bots to handle: because elaboration is hard to do when one is working from a prepared script, because such questions rely 'entirely' on context for their meaning, because they extend the relevant conversational history, rather than resetting it.