54 Quotes by Brian Christian

Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.

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.

If changing strategies doesn't help, you can try to change the game. And if that's not possible, you can at least exercise some control about which games you choose to play. The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades. Seek out games where honesty is the dominant strategy. Then just be yourself.

Their behavior is based on your own, just as your behavior is being influenced by theirs.

Love is like organized crime. It changes the structure of marriage game so that the equilibrium becomes the outcome that works for everybody.

And if you're the kind of person who always does what you think is right, no matter how crazy others think it is, take heart. The bad news is that you will be wrong more often that the herd followers. The good news is that sticking to your convictions creates a positive externality, letting people make accurate inferences from your behavior. There may come a time when you will save the entire herd from disaster.

There's a rule that you really only want to play one level above your opponent,' explains poker professional Vanessa Rousso. 'If you play to far above your opponent, you're going to think they have information that you want them to glean from your actions.

Marriage is a prisoner's dilemma in which you get to choose the person with whom you're in cahoots. This might seem like a small change, but it potentially has a big effect on the structure of the game you're playing. If you knew that, for some reason, your partner in crime would be miserable if you weren't around - the kind of misery even a million dollars couldn't cure - then you'd worry much less about them defecting and leaving you rot in jail.

Well, if the rules of the game force a bad strategy, maybe we shouldn't try to change strategies. Maybe we should try to change the game.