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:
This reflects particularly well on Yvain, Robin and Michael, all of whom managed to be both prolific and reliable in providing value with their quotes. I'm trying to think of a suitable metric by which I can formalise my intuitive evaluation.
I consider quotes with 0 votes to be a net negative contribution and it also raises the chance that other quotes by the poster are faux-wisdom. That is, that they appear deep at first glance for a casual reader but wouldn't stand up to scrutiny by someone who is paying close attention to actual meaning. That is, I would rate the comments that are posted via an 'accuracy by volume' approach as even worse than the average suggests because it signals a greater degree of superficiality bias.
Above considerations aside volume does provide some degree of increased value. In considering the question "Which contributor's page should I read in order to absorb the greatest improvement in quotey wisdom?" i may be better off with "16 in 5" than "22 in 2". On the other hand reading a "5 in 50" page may make me net sillier as I unconsciously absorb nonsense. Perhaps the ranking I'm looking for could be something as trivial as "Sum - Count * 4".
I think a good metric is this: Assuming we independently draw from the observed distribution of achieved karma scores, what is the probability that someone gets at least as much karma as Yvain when she posts as many quotes as Yvain? You can calculate this by iterated convolution. The assumption of total independence heavily favors Yvain, but I am fine with that.
I loaded the actual observed distribution, and calculated this score: