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.
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.