Top original authors by number of quotes. (Note that authors and mentions are not disambiguated.)

• Graham 47
• Feynman 47
• Russell 40
• Taleb 39
• Chesterton 37
• Pratchett 35
• Einstein 30
• Dennett 29
• Nietzsche 26
• Aaronson 23
• Heinlein 22
• Johnson 21
• Bacon 21
• Shaw 19
• Newton 19
• Franklin 19
• Wilson 18
• Darwin 18
• Kahneman 17
• Wittgenstein 15
• Munroe 15
• Dawkins 15
• Stephenson 14
• Sowell 14
• Silver 14
• Pinker 14
• Meier 14
• Asimov 14
• Aristotle 14
• Sagan 13
• Moldbug 13
• Eliezer 13
• Churchill 13
• Voltaire 12
• Minsky 12
• Mencken 12
• Maynard 12
• Locke 12
• Egan 12
• Clark 12
• SMBC 11
• Plato 11
• Orwell 11
• Neumann 11
• Marx 11
• Holmes 11
• Hofstadter 11
• Hoffer 11
• Descartes 11
• Buffett 11
• Aurelius 11
• Turing 10
• Screwtape 10
• Peirce 10
• Keynes 10
• Jaynes 10
• Hume 10
• Harris 10
• Gould 10
• Friedman 10
• Bakker 10
• Schopenhauer 9
• Huxley 9
• Goethe 9
• Deutsch 9
• Wilde 8
• Thoreau 8
• Morgan 8
• Montaigne 8
• Leibniz 8
• Greene 8
• Godin 8
• Crowley 8
• Carroll 8
• Brandon 8
• Yudkowsky 7
• Wong 7
• Wolfgang 7
• Vinci 7
• Szabo 7
• Munger 7
• Mitchell 7
• Medawar 7
• McArdle 7
• Lannister 7
• Kant 7
• Jefferson 7
• Hobbes 7
• Hanson 7
• Diogenes 7
• Dijkstra 7
• Confucius 7
• Carlyle 7
• Calvin 7

Top short quotes (2009-2014) by karma per character:

• 60 A Bet is a Tax on BullshitAlex Tabarrok
• 45 Luck is statistics taken personally.Penn Jillette
• 35 Comic Quote Minus 37-- Ryan ArmandAlso a favourite.
• 42 I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.Calvin
• 34 Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.Ken Wilber
• 51 I will not procrastinate regarding any ritual granting immortality.--Evil Overlord List #230
• 34 A problem well stated is a problem half solved.Charles Kettering
• 26 "I accidentally changed my mind."my four-year-old
• 27 "Most haystacks do not even have a needle."-- Lorenzo
• 50 He uses statistics as a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not for illumination.G.K. Chesterton
• 29 The greatest weariness comes from work not done.-Eric Hoffer
• 31 Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.Voltaire
• 32 If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid."Murphy's Laws of Combat"
• 41 The Noah principle: predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.-Warren E. Buffett
• 41 Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.-Joel Spolsky
• 25 What goes unsaid eventually goes unthought.Steve Sailer
• 40 People say "think outside the box," as if the box wasn't a fucking great idea.Sean Thomason
• 27 Procrastination is the thief of compound interest.-Venkatesh Rao
• 21 "A problem well put, is half solved." - John Dewey
• 38 A raise is only a raise for thirty days; after that, it’s just your salary.-- David Russo
• 37 It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s easier to lie without them.-Fred Mosteller
• 32 If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.-Seneca
• 25 The most practical thing in the world is a good theory.Helmholtz
• 35 It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.George Bernard Shaw
• 30 When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?John Maynard Keynes
• 27 Part of the potential of things is how they break.Vi Hart, How To Snakes
• 32 Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
• 29 Writing program code is a good way of debugging your thinking.-- Bill Venables
• 15 Focusing is about saying no.-- Steve Jobs
• 34 "Working in mysterious ways" is the greatest euphemism for failure ever devised.TheTweetOfGod
• 35 However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.-- Winston Churchill
• 29 "Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!"~Girl Genius
• 32 There is one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.Ran Prieur
• 32 The Company that needs a new machine tool is already paying for it.-old Warner Swasey ad
• 34 Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.S. T. Rev
• 22 Things are only impossible until they're not.-- Jean-Luc Picard
• 30 Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.— John Von Neumann
• 26 A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.Daniel Dennett
• 30 “Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
• 27 Complex problems have simple, easy to understand wrong answers.— Grossman's Law
• 25 The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.Gloria Steinem
• 31 It's a horrible feeling when you don't understand why you did something.-- Dennis Monokroussos
• 29 We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it.Mark Twain
• 27 It is easy to be certain....One has only to be sufficiently vague.Charles S. Peirce
• 26 Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?Jason Roy
• 12 Reality is not optional.Thomas Sowell
• 11 Death is the gods' crime.Unsounded
• 25 Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.Dean Schlicter
• 23 It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.Democritus
• 22 Most people would rather die than think; many do.– Bertrand Russell
• 28 Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.-- K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation
• 30 Now, now, perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything.--Professor Farnsworth, Futurama.
• 26 The dream is damned and dreamer too if dreaming's all that dreamers do.--Rory Miller
• 17 Statistics is applied philosophy of science.A. P. Dawid
• 19 Luck is opportunity plus preparation plus luck.--Jane Espenson
• 28 Nobody panics when things go "according to plan"… even if the plan is horrifying.The Joker
• 19 Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.Robert A. Heinlein
• 18 A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.Klingon proverb.
• 25 We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal
• 27 Train your tongue to say "I don't know", lest you be brought to falsehood -Babylonian Talmud
• 22 The only road to doing good shows, is doing bad shows.Louis C.K., on Reddit
• 17 Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious.— Errol Morris
• 20 Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.--Mike Tyson
• 22 Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.Lawrence Krauss
• 28 My brain technically-not-a-lies to me far more than it actually lies to me.-- Aristosophy (again)
• 26 “Anything left on your bucket list?”“Not dying...”-Bill Gates in his AMA on reddit.
• 20 Better our hypotheses die for our errors than ourselves.-- Karl Popper
• 27 If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance we can solve them.-- Isaac Asimov
• 23 "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."--Friedrich Nietzsche
• 26 A man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.Unknown
• 20 I honestly don't know. Let's see what happens.-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
• 26 Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.H.L. Mencken
• 27 The first rule of human club is you don't explicitly discuss the rules of human club.Silas Dogood
• 18 Good things come to those who steal them.-- Magnificent Sasquatch
• 14 "Anything you can do, I can do meta" -Rudolf Carnap
• 17 Mind is a machine for jumping to conclusions - Daniel Kahneman
• 20 The singularity is my retirement plan.-- tocomment, in a Hacker News post
• 26 If Tetris has taught me anything it's that errors pile up and accomplishments disappear.-Unknown
• 26 A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.Arthur C. Clarke
• 21 Know the hair you have to get the hair you want.-Pantene Pro-V hair care bottle
• 14 I intend to live forever or die trying-- Groucho Marx
• 26 We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish.-- F. A. Hayek
• 22 Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.-- Voltaire
• 19 In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.— Marvin Minsky
• 19 He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.J.S. Mill
• 25 A man who has committed a mistake and doesn't correct it, is committing another mistake.-Confucius
• 20 No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back.-- Turkish proverb
• 25 If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.Ariex
• 16 Keep your solutions close, and your problems closer.afoolswisdom
• 15 History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.-Mark Twain
• 11 Whenever you can, count.--Sir Francis Galton
• 19 God created the Earth, but the Dutch created the Netherlands.-- Dutch proverb

I'm confused about defection becoming a dominant strategy.. Because the existence of a dominant strategy suggests to me that there should exist a unique Nash equilibrium here, which is not the case. Everyone defecting is a Nash equilibrium, but 50 people cooperating and 49 defecting is a Nash equilibrium as well, and a better one at that. Something (quite likely my intuition regarding Nash equilibria in games with more than 2 players) is off here. Also, it is of course possible to calculate the optimal probability that we should defect and I agree with FeepingCreature that this should be 0.5-e, where e depends on the size of the player base and goes to 0 when the player base becomes infinite. But I highly doubt that there's an elegant formula for it. It seems (in my head at least) that already for, say, n=5 you have to do quite a bit of calculation, let alone n=99.

I don't know too much about decision theory, but I was thinking about it a bit more, and for me, the end result so far was that "dominant strategy" is just a flawed concept.

If the agents behave superrationally, they do not care about the dominant strategy, and they are safe from this attack. And the "super" in superrational is pretty misleading, because it suggests some extra-human capabilities, but in this particular case it is so easy to see through the whole ruse, one has to be pretty dumb not to behave superrationally. (That is, not to consider the fact that other agents will have to go though the same analysis as ourselves.)

Superrationality works best when we actually know that the others have the same input-output function as ourselves, for example when we know that we are clones or software copies of each others. But real life is not like that, and now I believe that the clean mathematical formulation of such dilemmas (with payoff matrices and all that) is misleading, because it sweeps under the rug another, very fuzzy, hard to formalize input variable: the things that we know about the reasoning processes of the other agents. (In the particular case of the P+epsilon attack, we don't have to assume too much about the other agents. In general, we do.)

I don't think so. They're running on the blockchain, which slows them down. The primary decision-making mechanisms for them are going to basically be the same as can be used for existing organizations, like democracy, prediction markets, etc. Unless you think your bank or government is going to become a seed AI, there's not that much more to DAOs.

An advanced DAO (decentralized/distributed autonomous organization), the way Vitalik images it, is a pretty believable candidate for an uncontrolled seed AI, so I'm not sure Eliezer and co shares Vitalik's apparent enthusiasm regarding the convergence of these two sets of ideas.

Cosma Shalizi, in bookmarking Scott's post, offers some specific, relevant references to Plato (and some amusing tags).

Tononi gives a very interesting (weird?) reply: Why Scott should stare at a blank wall and reconsider (or, the conscious grid), where he accepts the very unintuitive conclusion that an empty square grid is conscious according to his theory. (Scott's phrasing: "[Tononi] doesn’t “bite the bullet” so much as devour a bullet hoagie with mustard.") Here is Scott's reply to the reply:

Giulio Tononi and Me: A Phi-nal Exchange

It gets complicated if you do not draw an arbitrary border where matter becomes part of your body and where it ceases to do so.

The Trans-Siberian Railway runs for more than 9000 kilometres between Moscow and Vladivostok. Is the Moscow end "the same thing as" the Vladivostok end? Are they "the same thing as" its passage through Novosibirsk?

If one is not puzzled by these conundrums about an object extended in space, I see no reason to be puzzled over the "identity" of an object extended in time, such as a human life.

Pinero pursed his lips and considered. "No doubt you are all familiar with the truism that life is electrical in nature. Well, that truism isn't worth a damn, but it will help to give you an idea of the principle. You have also been told that time is a fourth dimension. Maybe you believe it, perhaps not. It has been said so many times that it has ceased to have any meaning. It is simply a cliché that windbags use to impress fools. But I want you to try to visualize it now, and try to feel it emotionally."

He stepped up to one of the reporters. "Suppose we take you as an example. Your name is Rogers, is it not? Very well, Rogers, you are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event, reaching to, perhaps, 1905, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man some place in the 1980s. Imagine this space-time event, which we call Rogers, as a long pink worm, continuous through the years. It stretches past us here in 1939, and the cross section we see appears as a single, discrete body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity to this pink worm, enduring through the years. As a matter of fact, there is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals."

Robert Heinlein, "Life-line"