Top 40 Brian Christian Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Look-Then-Leap Rule: You set a predetermined amount of time for “looking” – that is, exploring your options, gathering data – in which you categorically don’t choose anyone, no matter how impressive. After that point, you enter the “leap” phase, prepared to instantly commit to anyone who outshines the best applicant you saw in the look phase. We.”

— Brian Christian

2. “Learning self-control is important, but it’s equally important to grow up in an environment where adults are consistently present and trustworthy.”

— Brian Christian

3. “Communication is one of those delightful things that work only in practice; in theory it’s impossible.”

— Brian Christian

4. “Sorting something that you will never search is a complete waste; searching something you never sorted is merely inefficient.”

— Brian Christian

5. “Computer scientists would call this a “ping attack” or a “denial of service” attack: give a system an overwhelming number of trivial things to do, and the important things get lost in the chaos.”

— Brian Christian

6. “Even the best strategy sometimes yields bad results – which is why computer scientists take care to distinguish between “process” and “outcome.” If you followed the best possible process, then you’ve done all you can, and you shouldn’t blame yourself if things didn’t go your way.”

— Brian Christian

7. “Although computer science tends to be thought of as a traditionally male-dominated field, the world’s first programmer was a woman.”

— Brian Christian

8. “Computers can only do one thing: math. Fortunately for them, a shockingly high percentage of life can be translated into math.”

— Brian Christian

9. “So explore when you will have time to use the resulting knowledge, exploit when you’re ready to cash in. The interval makes the strategy.”

— Brian Christian

10. “No choice recurs. We may get similar choices again, but never that exact one. Hesitation – inaction – is just as irrevocable as action. What the motorist, locked on the one-way road, is to space, we are to the fourth dimension: we truly pass this way but once.”

— Brian Christian

11. “Unless we’re willing to spend eons striving for perfection every time we encounter a hitch, hard problems demand that instead of spinning our tires we imagine easier versions and tackle those first. When applied correctly, this is not just wishful thinking, not fantasy or idle daydreaming. It’s one of our best ways of making progress.”

— Brian Christian

12. “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.”

— Brian Christian

13. “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.”

— Brian Christian

14. “We say “brain fart” when we should really say “cache miss.”

— Brian Christian

15. “Meanwhile, the kale market grew by 40% in 2013 alone. The biggest purchaser of kale the year before had been Pizza Hut, which put it in their salad bars – as decoration.”

— Brian Christian

16. “If you’re flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.”

— Brian Christian

17. “The road to hell is paved with intractable recursions, bad equilibria, and information cascades.”

— Brian Christian

18. “We can hope to be fortunate – but we should strive to be wise.”

— Brian Christian

19. “Everything starts to break down, however, when a species gains language. What we talk about isn’t what we experience – we speak chiefly of interesting things, and those tend to be things that are uncommon.”

— Brian Christian

20. “Toti rivalii sunt simbionti. Au nevoie unul de celalalt. Fiecare il face pe celalalt sa devina mai bun.”

— Brian Christian

21. “Love is like organized crime. It.”

— Brian Christian

22. “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.”

— Brian Christian

23. “Thrashing is a very recognizable human state. If you’ve ever had a moment where you wanted to stop doing everything just to have the chance to write down everything you were supposed to be doing, but couldn’t spare the time, you’ve thrashed.”

— Brian Christian

24. “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.”

— Brian Christian

25. “As Trick points out, sports leagues aren’t concerned with determining the rankings as quickly and expeditiously as possible. Instead, sports calendars are explicitly designed to maintain tension throughout the season, something that has rarely been a concern of sorting theory. For.”

— Brian Christian

26. “As Carl Sagan put it, “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

— Brian Christian

27. “The old adage tells us that “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” but the math tells us why: the unknown has a chance of being better, even if we actually expect it to be no different, or if it’s just as likely to be worse.”

— Brian Christian

28. “Existence without essence is very stressful.”

— Brian Christian

29. “If you want to be a good intuitive Bayesian – if you want to naturally make good predictions, without having to think about what kind of prediction rule is appropriate – you need to protect your priors. Counterintuitively, that might mean turning off the news.”

— Brian Christian

30. “Hesitation – inaction – is just as irrevocable as action.”

— Brian Christian

31. “The patent talks about “anticipatory package shipping,” which the press seized upon as though Amazon could somehow mail you something before you bought it.”

— Brian Christian

32. “When we talk about decision-making, we usually focus just on the immediate payoff of a single decision – and if you treat every decision as if it were your last, then indeed only exploitation makes sense. But 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.”

— Brian Christian

33. “I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. – STEPHEN GRELLET.”

— Brian Christian

34. “Don’t always consider all your options. Don’t necessarily go for the outcome that seems best every time.”

— Brian Christian

35. “You should consider that Imitation is the most acceptable part of Worship, and that the Gods had much rather Mankind should Resemble, than Flatter them. – MARCUS AURELIUS.”

— Brian Christian

36. “When our expectations are uncertain and the data are noisy, the best bet is to paint with a broad brush.”

— Brian Christian

37. “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.”

— Brian Christian

38. “They don’t need a therapist; they need an algorithm.”

— Brian Christian

39. “Win-Stay, Lose-Shift algorithm: choose an arm at random, and keep pulling it as long as it keeps paying off. If the arm doesn’t pay off after a particular pull, then switch to the other one. Although this simple strategy is far from a complete solution, Robbins proved in 1952 that it performs reliably better than chance.”

— Brian Christian

40. “Indeed, the embeddings, simple as they are – just a row of numbers for each word, based on predicting nearby missing words in a text – seemed to capture a staggering amount of real-world information.”

— Brian Christian

41. “Learning the structure of the world around us and forming lasting social relationships are both lifelong tasks.”

— Brian Christian

42. “Living by the wisdom of computer science doesn’t sound so bad after all. And unlike most advice, it’s backed up by proofs.”

— Brian Christian

43. “When balancing favorite experiences and new ones, nothing matters as much as the interval over which we plan to enjoy them.”

— Brian Christian

44. “Want to calculate the chance your bus is late? The chance your softball team will win? Count the number of times it has happened in the past plus one, then divide by the number of opportunities plus two. And the beauty of Laplace’s Law is that it works equally well whether we have a single data point or millions of them.”

— Brian Christian

45. “It’s amazing,” he says, “how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.” And, as far too many can attest, how it halves when you take that responsibility and trust away.”

— Brian Christian

46. “The next pages begin our journey through some of the biggest challenges faced by computers and human minds alike: how to manage finite space, finite time, limited attention, unknown unknowns, incomplete information, and an unforeseeable future;.”

— Brian Christian

47. “As we’re on the cusp of using machine learning for rendering basically all kinds of consequential decisions about human beings in domains such as education, employment, advertising, health care and policing, it is important to understand why machine learning is not, by default, fair or just in any meaningful way.”

— Brian Christian

48. “They said people should have the right to ask for an explanation of algorithmically made decisions.”

— Brian Christian