DanielVarga comments on Best of Rationality Quotes, 2011 Edition - Less Wrong

29 Post author: DanielVarga 28 December 2011 05:32AM

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Comment author: DanielVarga 28 December 2011 03:07:18AM *  9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: DanielVarga 28 December 2011 03:08:09AM *  8 points [-]

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
Comment author: Will_Newsome 30 December 2011 02:12:12AM *  6 points [-]

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

Comment author: DanielVarga 30 December 2011 12:25:44PM 6 points [-]

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

Comment author: Will_Newsome 30 December 2011 09:07:19PM 2 points [-]

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?)

Comment author: FeatherlessBiped 30 December 2011 10:46:51PM 3 points [-]

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".

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 30 December 2011 11:53:00AM *  2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: NihilCredo 30 December 2011 02:30:39PM *  2 points [-]

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).

Comment author: DanielVarga 30 December 2011 03:07:02PM 1 point [-]

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.)

Comment author: gwern 31 December 2011 02:34:16AM 1 point [-]

Does the processing throw away Aubrey de Grey as well?

Comment author: DanielVarga 31 December 2011 12:17:43PM 0 points [-]

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