Brian Christian
Brian Christian is the author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker favorite book of the year. He is the coauthor, with Tom Griffiths, of Algorithms to Live By, a #1 Audible bestseller, Amazon best science book of the year and MIT Technology Review best book of the year. Christian holds degrees in philosophy, computer science, and poetry, is an active open-source contributor to projects such as Ruby on Rails, and is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco.
Methodology & Culture
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of the new and familiar is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries; they're not. Computers, like us, confront limited space and time, so computer scientists have been grappling with similar problems for decades. And the solutions they’ve found have much to teach us. In a lively, interdisciplinary talk, Brian Christian shows how algorithms developed for computers also untangle very human questions. They explain how to have better hunches and when to leave things to chance, how to deal with overwhelming choices and how best to connect with others. From finding a spouse to finding a parking spot, from organizing one’s inbox to pee