Top short quotes (2009-2013) by karma per character:
Nice work!
It occurs to me that there shouldn't be any copyright issues with CFAR releasing a nicely-formatted version of the 2009-2013 page as an ebook, with the nice Varga-collected stats as appendices.
If you want your terminal to greet you with rationality quotes, I created a new fortunes file: https://github.com/Huluk/rationality-fortunes Use with "unix fortune" for your operating system.
Great idea! I'm tempted to chop these up and put them into a mailing list - I feel they would be more useful in a one-quote-a-day format than in one big block.
Top original authors by number of quotes. (Note that authors and mentions are not disambiguated.)
Top original authors by karma collected:
Could you please spell out your implication? There are a number of ways to interpret your statement.
From this list of authors by number of quotes, I can't distinguish this collection from a collection that is exclusive to quotes from men (and unnamed sources).
I ask to be shown a distinction, i.e. a female who was quoted seven times or more.
Or just once, really. I haven't seen even a single quote from a female when skimming the main list.
So, I think my favorite female public rationalist is Byron Katie, who has a number of great rationality quotes, most of which boil down to this one (which is I think her only quote in the LW RQs):
When I argue with reality, I lose -- but only 100 percent of the time.
Close to it is one by Karen Pryor:
Nowadays many educated people treat reinforcement theory as if it were something not terribly important that they have known and understood all along. In fact most people don't understand it, or they would not behave so badly to the people around them.
Above that is Megan McArdle, and the highest quote I saw that was probably by a woman was this one (I didn't look in to whether or not that Ashley is female), and this is the highest one I saw I'm pretty confident was by a woman. (A number of them were attributed to internet callsigns, which are difficult to reliably map to sex.)
If you think that more female authors on the list would be an improvement, then find female rationalists who say things worth quoting, and then quote them.
That's not your implication.
Clearly, you said that to make a point. You're not making a random observation; it's not the equivalent of "I only found five people in the list whose names are greater than 14 letters long". So what's your point?
Of course the observation isn't random. Gender imbalance is obviously more interesting than name length and the difference in curiosity needs no justification.
Let's help chaosmage express himself a bit: "I do not recognize any names of women in this. I wonder why that is."
Discuss.
Gender imbalance is obviously more interesting than name length and the difference in curiosity needs no justification.
Which interest is not obvious. Here's a handful of possible points which could be made by that observation:
Someone trying to make the first point, and someone trying to make the third point, have radically different interpretations of the observed data, and the resulting conversation will be very different depending on which point you think they're trying to make.
What's the reason we have to browbeat him to constrain the discussion to some specific point? To me it's obvious several points could be made and the observation could be a sufficient discussion starter.
What's the reason we have to browbeat him to constrain the discussion to some specific point?
Particularly on political issues, a "I observed X. Discuss." has the potential to be a trap. Each of the points I made in the grandparent post can be construed as a political attack- the first on women, the second two on the LW community- and simultaneously attacking everyone because of a lack of clarity is, generally speaking, a conversational and political mistake. It's not obvious which issue to engage with, and engaging with the incorrect issue is dangerous.
It's not difficult to deduce what kind of a response to the implication question is a socially acceptable one. I might also have no implication. Even if my implication was benign I wouldn't give you the answer. I don't want to reward coercion or biasing a conversation before it's even started. I don't know why people pretend to expect honest answers to such questioning.
If you expect everyone to be totally biased in the conversation then instead of picking the right soldiers for the battle I would suggest concluding that the topic is simply too political to discuss in a rational manner.
If you browbeat people for making observations on issues that might need fixing you're limiting your options for doing any fixing.
It's not difficult to deduce what kind of a response to the implication question is a socially acceptable one.
If you are saying that he can figure out whether lying or telling the truth about his implication is socially acceptable, sure.
The real problem is that he already had an implication, but he's using the fact that it's an implication to maintain plausible deniability by not coming out and saying it. Saying it may be socially unacceptable, but that's because making the implication is also socially unacceptable.
It seems to me you've already decided what he was trying to imply. It might not be wise to do that based on such a simple remark.
If he brought it up to point out there should be more women on the list, you've likely just lost an ally. You've pretty much also lost the opportunity to make that point to anyone who noticed your prejudice.
has the potential to be a trap ... engaging with the incorrect issue is dangerous.
What kind of danger are we talking about?
Psychic and social- it'd be difficult for it to be physical! Implying someone is a cryptosexist when they are a feminist, or implying that they are a feminist when they are a cryptosexist, is likely to be a good way to offend them (or make them think poorly of you), and then there are coalition politics to consider.
I'm not trying to be political here, and I don't think this is about LW or rationality, at all. If that observation is to have a point, I'd suggest an entirely different one:
It isn't just that scripture, constitutions and classics of literature were mostly written by men. Or that men just write more, in science, in journalism, in genre fiction etc. and almost all quotes are from written, rather than spoken expression... That's all just the "being quoted" side of it. But the quoter participates, and I think quoters are usually male too. Even The Simpsons get quoted mostly by guys rather than than girls, at least around me...
It's clear to me how quotation as a male form of communication would mean that women quote less, which you could check by comparing the usernames of quoters to the post-weighted sex distriubtion on LW. It's not as clear to me how it would mean women get quoted less- that would have to be either because of my first or second explanations. (I'm counting "men quote men more frequently than they quote women, and men dominate LW" as part of my second point.)
I honestly didn't have one. I was just noticing my confusion.
Now that you ask, I've come up with the hypothesis that (verbatim) quotation as a form of communication is very male: men quote men far more than women quote women. I do not have a hypothesis on whether women quote men more than men quote women, or vice versa.
Given that historically, men have simply written more than women and more often acquired positions that made you famous enough to be quoted, I would expect that men just get quoted more often in general. The question whether men also actively quote more than women is another one.
From looking at the scripts, it appears first and last names (actually, all capitalised words I think) were counted separately ("Neal: 11, Stephenson: 11" and "Munroe: 13, Randall: 11", etc) and first names were handedited out (so that's why both Nassim and Taleb are on the list).
The answer is somewhere between "Nassim Taleb was quoted 16 times, and three of those times the attribution was just 'Taleb'" and "Nassim Taleb was quoted 13 times and was mentioned in three other quotes (since he's a controversial figure)".
Yes. To be exact, not all capitalized words, but all capitalized words that my English spellchecker does not recognize. With all capitalized words the list would start like this:
Of course the spellchecking method is itself a source of errors. Previous years I never felt like manually correcting these, but checking now it seems like these were the main victims:
Graham is actually number one. I added them to this list, and also to the "Top original authors by karma collected" list. Not retroactively, though, just for 2013.
With all capitalized words the list would start like this:
You know that feeling you get when you're coding, and you write something poorly and briefly expect it to Do What You Mean, before being abruptly corrected by the output? I think I just had that feeling at long distance.
Top quote contributors by total (2009-2013) karma score collected:
Top quote contributors of 2013 by statistical significance level:
I posted 2 rationality quotes that year, but the one from may attracted a surprising number of upvotes. It seems a little unfair that Anna Salamon's checklist of rationality habits, one of the top five best html documents I've found ever, has only a couple points more. Other users had already opined that karma is a bit broken as a measure, but that was when I started to alieve it. It's amused me to see other users want to submit posts and ask for free karma, because LW is already handing out free karma pretty much
I am a little chagrined that though I am #2 by total karma, I have only 2 in the bests list. Seems I need to be a little more selective in the future.
You are #2 by karma collected from 2009 to 2013, not just in 2013. You earned an average of 8.20 karma points from 5 quotes in 2013, and an average of 11.05 karma points from 81 quotes in total, which is near to a P-value of 0.5 in my statistical test.
Oh, these are all cumulative lifetime total karma scores...? I thought these numbers were just for 2013.
Top quote contributors by karma score collected in 2013:
Here is the 2013 edition of the Best of Rationality Quotes collection. (Here is last year's.)
Best of Rationality Quotes 2013 (400kB page, 350 quotes)
and Best of Rationality Quotes 2009-2013 (1600kB page, 1490 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.
As is now usual, I provide various statistics and top-lists based on the data. (Source code for these is also at the above link, see the README.) I added these as comments to the post: