Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010 (Warning: 750kB page, 774 quotes)
The year's last Rationality Quotes thread has calmed down, so now it is a good time to update my Best of Rationality Quotes page, and write a top post about it. (The original version was introduced in the June 2010 Open Thread.)
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 4 or more, and sorts them by score.
There is a minor complication: The obvious idea is to consider only top-level comments, that is, comments that are not replies to other comments. Unfortunately, good quotes are sometimes replies to other quotes. Of course, even more often, replies are not quotes. This is a precision-recall trade-off. Originally I went for recall, because I liked many replied quotes such as this. But as JGWeissman noted in a comment below, to build the precise version, only a trivial modification of my script is needed. So I built it, and I preferred it to the noisy version after all. So now at the top of this post we have the filtered version, and here is the original version with even more good quotes, but also with many non-quotes:
Best of Rationality Quotes 2009/2010, including replied comments (Warning: 1.3MB page, 1358 quotes)
UPDATE: I changed the links and rewrote the above when I decided to filter replied comments.
UPDATE 2: Added a comment listing the personal quote collection pages of top quote contributors.
UPDATE 3: Responding to various requests by commenters, added several top-lists:
Reading the top quotes, I found What is Wrong With Our Thoughts by David Stove again, quoted by EY. At some point I read that, but forgot the metadata and was unable to find it again when I went looking for it later.
In that chapter, written in 1991, David Stove calls for a nosology of thought - that is, a classification of the many ways human thought can go wrong. It seems to me that Less Wrong's sequences contain just such a classification, and that explaining what's wrong with the many examples about three should not be so difficult anymore.
do you need the sequences or is it enough to say that the beliefs espoused in the three examples do not pay rent? it seems to me that what is missing from the vast epistemological debate throughout human history is the idea that truth only means anything in relation to goals.