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.
Top original authors by total karma score collected:
G.K. Chesterton the Catholic apologist at number 5! Suhweet. (I really, really like Chesterton.)
I looked at the Chesterton quotes, they are all very rational, no discrepancy here. Here are the top ones:
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?)
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".
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.
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).
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.)
Top quote contributors by statistical significance level:
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.
The same list only for this year's comments:
I have a secret weapon for next year, though: Kaas's Twitter feed.
Wait, pretend you never read that.
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.
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)
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: