algorithms to live by brian christian and tom griffiths

In Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths make the case that computer science, a field that’s typically seen as highly specialized, actually contains a wealth of practical knowledge we can use to improve our lives. We’ll also compare and contrast Christian and Griffiths’s advice to more traditional self-help perspectives on the same topics, such as the productivity advice in Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog! and organizational advice in Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.ġ-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Algorithms to Live By In this guide, you’ll learn how to schedule your to-do list the same way computers do, why making random decisions is sometimes the smartest thing to do, and why you should reject the first 37% of jobs in your search for employment. Is it possible that the age-old question of how best to live has already been solved by computer engineers? In Algorithms to Live By, science writer Brian Christian and Berkeley psychologist Tom Griffiths team up to prove that computer science is a fount of unconventional wisdom with practical value in many areas of human life. Humans and computers face many of the same problems: We both have a never-ending stream of things we want to do and a limited amount of time and energy to do them. Ultimately, what we can gain is not only a set of concrete takeaways for the problems around us, not only a new way to see the elegant structures behind even the hairiest human dilemmas, not only a recognition of the travails of humans and computers as deeply conjoined, but something even more profound: a new vocabulary for the world around us, and a chance to learn something truly new about ourselves.Book Rating by Shortform Readers: 4.5 ( 193 reviews) And we will learn about how the mind works, about its distinct but deeply related ways of tackling the same set of issues and coping with the same constraints. We will learn about the fundamental mathematical structure of these challenges and about how computers are engineered-sometimes counter to what we imagine-to make the most of them. 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 how to do so with grace and confidence and how to do so in a community with others who are all simultaneously trying to do the same.

Algorithms to live by brian christian and tom griffiths