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.
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 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.
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
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:
Statistics
Education
Reality
No
Reform
Mind
Stopping thought
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.
Does the processing throw away Aubrey de Grey as well?
It throws away de Grey but keeps Aubrey. :) But I only see two Aubrey de Grey quotes in the whole corpus: This and this.
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.)