List of compartmentalized people (who both win and fail at truth-seeking)

One PR problem is that the list may come across as an attempt to shame people out of their ideas (as opposed to an instructive list of examples of failure modes), and so people seeing the list may mistakenly infer that LessWrong thinks it has enough social clout to make famous thinkers fear its disapproval, and hence that LessWrong has delusions of grandeur. "Irrationalists" seems like a bad thing to title the page in this context.

Well, if it was titled "list of succesful people with weird beliefs" it would be a fun curiosity instead of weird and creepy.

That sounds right; so can we find a different way to learn such lessons as we would have learned from this exercise?

I don't understand the standards you and your upvoters are using. So Eliezer can single out Aumann (with summaries of as much scholarly merit as the ones on the wiki page), to name one, in multiple articles - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments; XiXiDu can make a list - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments; I, timtyler, and nhamann can suggest additions - to general upvotes and lack of Vladimir_M comments, and so on except when I post a Discussion article about a wiki article, then it gets fiercely downvoted.

What lesson am I meant to infer from this? That I am not high-status enough to make such claims (but Eliezer is)? That only now have people come to their senses under your trenchant critique? That it's fine to name names and have a community-wide agreement that some are beyond the pale - but we dare not write it down?

And as far as bad taste goes - I would think that the ones with mental illness would be the most valuable ones to include inasmuch as they are the only ones most of the rest of humanity will agree with us in saying that they were flat-out wrong and this demonstrates compartmentalization. (There's a difference between mental diseases and mere religious or other beliefs...? But the mind is a physical thing, so the difference is not one of kind.)

No problem, I'll kill any living people that are added to the list. That will solve all the public relations problems stemming from such a list.

Remember that Newton lived before Darwin. The Bible was the history of the world and nature was obviously the work of an intelligent designer. It may be supposed that Newton's occult investigations were performed rationally, given those premises.

Newton experimented extensively with alchemy. If he wasn't already mentally unstable, he may have been driven mad by prolonged mercury exposure.

I think that the composition of a list of people 'holding obviously false beliefs' depends in large part on who is making the list.

Agreed.

For example, I was expecting James D. Watson to be on the list.

Disagree.

His comments where mostly accurate as far as sloppy human statements go. However he was foolish to agree to the interaction without properly testing his social skills and compiling a full list of taboos one must never touch when talking to seemingly benign and amicable journalists (subset of humans, the ones that are still alive aren't always benign).

Others may disagree.

Which is why you have chosen an excellent example. You, Dan Moore, must be the pride of [subject hometown here]!

I was trying to get at Aumann being clever and statistics-savvy enough not to state that they exist for certain, but that he is almost as wrong to assign them any non-negligible probability (as he clearly does).

Well, I'm not sure 'strong' is the best adjective (what weak examples are we thinking of?) but that's a better name, I agree. I've moved it.

I like the term. People who are demonstrably capable of rationality, yet choose not to be in all areas.

I am a bit shocked to find out that Freeman Dyson is a Christian...