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DanielVarga13y50

Top quote contributors by total karma score collected:

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.

DanielVarga13y60

The same list only for this year's comments:

... (read more)

39

Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition

28th Dec 2011

1 min read

39

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)

and Best of Rationality Quotes 2009-2011 (700kB page, 706 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 total karma score collected
Top quote contributors by karma score collected in 2011
Top quote contributors by statistical significance level (See this comment for a description of this metric.)
Top original authors by number of quotes
Top original authors by total karma score collected

Rationality Quotes

39

New Comment

25 comments, sorted by

Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 9:22 PM

[-]DanielVarga13y130

Top original authors by number of quotes.

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.

[-]DanielVarga13y120

Top original authors by total karma score collected:

[-]Will_Newsome13y70

G.K. Chesterton the Catholic apologist at number 5! Suhweet. (I really, really like Chesterton.)

[-]DanielVarga13y70

I looked at the Chesterton quotes, they are all very rational, no discrepancy here. Here are the top ones:

[-]Will_Newsome13y20

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?)

[-]FeatherlessBiped13y50

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".

[-]Jayson_Virissimo13y10

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?

[-]DanielVarga13y00

It throws away de Grey but keeps Aubrey. :) But I only see two Aubrey de Grey quotes in the whole corpus: This and this.

[-]NihilCredo13y10

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).

[-]DanielVarga13y10

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.)

[-]DanielVarga13y60

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

[-]DanielVarga13y50

Top quote contributors by total karma score collected:

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.

[-]DanielVarga13y60

The same list only for this year's comments:

373 RichardKennaway

372 gwern

Curse you Kennaway!

[-]wedrifid13y00

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.

[-][anonymous]13y30

That one's on my favorites list too.

[-][anonymous]13y10

.

[-]wedrifid13y00

I have a secret weapon for next year, though: Kaas's Twitter feed.

The French singer?

You'll see. Bwa ha ha ha! Ahem.

[-]alexvermeer13y40

This is great. Thanks for putting in the time to make it.

[-]DanielVarga13y50

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.