Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition
I created a 2011 update to last year’s Best of Rationality Quotes collection. (Here is the original.)
Best of Rationality Quotes 2011 (360kB page, 352 quotes)
The page was built by a short script (source code here) from all the LW Rationality Quotes threads so far. (We had such a thread each month since April 2009.) The script collects all comments with karma score 10 or more, and sorts them by score. Replies are not collected, only top-level comments.
A year ago commenters asked for various statistics and top-lists based on the data. This year I re-ran the scripts I wrote to answer those requests. (Source code for these is also at the above link, see the README.) I added the results as comments to this post:
Top quote contributors by statistical significance level (See this comment for a description of this metric.)
Top original authors by number of quotes.
Feynman 28
Russell 26
Pratchett 18
Nietzsche 18
Heinlein 18
Einstein 15
Dawkins 14
Chesterton 12
Wilson 11
Johnson 11
Asimov 11
Taleb 10
Dennett 10
Darwin 10
Voltaire 9
Meier 9
Hume 9
Clark 9
Buffett 9
Neumann 8
Thoreau 7
Rochefoucauld 7
Peirce 7
Medawar 7
Keynes 7
Huxley 7
Gould 7
Dijkstra 7
Aristotle 7
Yudkowsky 6
Plato 6
Orwell 6
Munroe 6
Mencken 6
Marx 6
Marshall 6
Lichtenberg 6
Kant 6
Jaynes 6
In fact, these are mentions, not really authors. Methodology: I collected the most frequent capitalized words in the comments, threw away the ones recognized by my morphological analyzer, and did a small amount of manual postprocessing. Note that Bacon, Wells and Hawking are recognized by my morphological analyzer.
Top original authors by total karma score collected:
290 Russell
274 Feynman
270 Pratchett
195 Chesterton
155 Heinlein
143 Darwin
142 Nietzsche
141 Dennett
133 Buffett
129 Dawkins
125 Voltaire
123 Asimov
107 Egan
102 Einstein
96 Wilson
84 Descartes
81 Maynard
80 Plato
80 Lessing
78 Taleb
78 Orwell
78 Munroe
78 Churchill
76 Neumann
75 Johnson
74 Aristotle
70 Bakker
66 Hitler
66 Aaronson
65 Keynes
64 Mencken
64 Lichtenberg
64 Dijkstra
62 Holmes
61 Marx
61 Kant
61 Caplan
60 Miyazaki
60 McArdle
60 Knuth
60 Hayao
G.K. Chesterton the Catholic apologist at number 5! Suhweet. (I really, really like Chesterton.)
I looked at the Chesterton quotes, they are all very rational, no discrepancy here. Here are the top ones:
Statistics
Education
Reality
No
Reform
Mind
Stopping thought
It might strike people as odd, though, that most or at least half of those quotes come from books arguing for Catholicism. (They’re really good! Can LessWrong start a Chesterton-is-awesome meme maybe?)
Whether Chesterton gets a positive meme or not, he remains awesome! He had a singular talent for focusing a blazing spotlight on various kinds of intellectual foolishness. More remarkably, for someone of such immense literary and intellectual accomplishment, he had an unshakable faith in the good sense of the “average man”.
Maybe this is the confirmation bias talking, but it seems to me that at the highest levels of human creativity you find mostly people that are at least slightly crazy.
Does the processing throw away Aubrey de Grey as well?
It throws away de Grey but keeps Aubrey. :) But I only see two Aubrey de Grey quotes in the whole corpus: This and this.
You should probably remove Scott, if I am correct in thinking that it’s actually a combination of Adams, Aaronson and Bakker (and there might well be everything from Bon Scott to Sir Walter Scott in there).
You are right. I removed Scott. I checked the list again, and spotted and removed Winston. Now it seems legit, except for the hard-to-correct discrepancy between mention and author. (Marx and Hitler are mostly mentions.)
Top quote contributors by statistical significance level:
0.00251 (17.61 in 18): Tesseract
0.00278 (34.00 in 3): Oscar_Cunningham
0.00340 (26.60 in 5): Alejandro1
0.00370 (57.00 in 1): michaelkeenan
0.00421 (13.61 in 54): Rain
0.00553 (30.00 in 3): benelliott
0.00607 (17.64 in 14): DSimon
0.00691 (16.00 in 20): Yvain
0.00835 (25.25 in 4): peter_hurford
0.00893 (23.20 in 5): Maniakes
0.00951 (45.00 in 1): Mycroft65536
0.00977 (32.50 in 2): Eugine_Nier
0.01266 (20.83 in 6): Unnamed
0.01321 (43.00 in 1): Liron
0.01354 (13.04 in 50): MichaelGR
0.01796 (40.00 in 1): bentarm
0.02142 (24.00 in 3): Manfred
0.02578 (16.60 in 10): GabrielDuquette
0.02744 (15.83 in 12): Jayson_Virissimo
0.03485 (25.00 in 2): Automaton
0.03949 (21.33 in 3): Miller
0.04067 (13.10 in 29): RobinZ
0.04112 (15.36 in 11): James_Miller
0.04165 (16.38 in 8): MinibearRex
0.04178 (16.86 in 7): sketerpot
0.04359 (19.25 in 4): Costanza
0.04649 (29.00 in 1): abcd_z
0.04649 (29.00 in 1): JamesAndrix
0.04669 (19.00 in 4): jaimeastorga2000
0.05147 (15.88 in 8): MichaelHoward
0.05177 (28.00 in 1): summerstay
0.05236 (14.46 in 13): Nominull
0.05327 (20.00 in 3): J_Taylor
0.05327 (20.00 in 3): Kyre
0.05758 (27.00 in 1): jasonmcdowell
0.05867 (22.00 in 2): knb
0.06377 (21.50 in 2): Vladimir_M
Top quote contributors by total karma score collected:
1122 RichardKennaway
735 Rain
652 MichaelGR
560 anonym
545 gwern
540 Eliezer_Yudkowsky
380 RobinZ
347 CronoDAS
320 Yvain
317 Tesseract
258 billswift
247 DSimon
216 Thomas
215 Kutta
190 Jayson_Virissimo
188 Nominull
179 lukeprog
169 NancyLebovitz
169 James_Miller
166 GabrielDuquette
155 Konkvistador
150 Nic_Smith
143 djcb
140 Kaj_Sotala
136 ata
133 scav
133 Alejandro1
131 MinibearRex
127 MichaelHoward
125 Unnamed
124 Patrick
120 Cyan
118 sketerpot
118 Morendil
116 Maniakes
115 Rune
115 ABranco
113 roland
109 wedrifid
108 Alicorn
By the way, looking at the data it is obvious that more recent comments have a very large advantage in the karma collection game. Similarly, a quote has an enormous disadvantage if it is added in the middle of the month when thread activity has died down already. It would be more fair to normalize by, say, median karma score of the given month, and again by median karma score of the day of the month, but I think nobody cares that much.
The same list only for this year’s comments:
373 RichardKennaway
372 gwern
266 MichaelGR
242 Tesseract
179 lukeprog
173 DSimon
169 Nominull
166 GabrielDuquette
161 billswift
155 Konkvistador
149 Thomas
141 CronoDAS
133 Alejandro1
131 MinibearRex
123 scav
116 Maniakes
114 Kutta
107 Patrick
102 Oscar_Cunningham
102 Jayson_Virissimo
101 peter_hurford
100 James_Miller
96 anonym
92 Dreaded_Anomaly
90 benelliott
89 Alicorn
86 Risto_Saarelma
86 NancyLebovitz
85 MichaelHoward
83 RobinZ
80 wedrifid
78 Bugmaster
77 Costanza
75 djcb
72 Manfred
65 Eugine_Nier
65 [deleted]
63 Nic_Smith
61 Miller
60 J_Taylor
Curse you Kennaway!
You can’t compete with raw volume!
I have a secret weapon for next year, though: Kaas’s Twitter feed.
Wait, pretend you never read that.
.
That one’s on my favorites list too.
.
The French singer?
You’ll see. Bwa ha ha ha! Ahem.
This is great. Thanks for putting in the time to make it.
You are most welcome. One year ago it was a nontrivial effort, about two workdays in total. This year it would have been trivial, had I documented the process then. Now I finally have the scripts and documentation mostly in order, so I think next year this will be really easy.
Thanks, nice work.
The comment: 13 points Hey 02 November 2011 09:01:09AM is maybe something you want to remove.