‘Personally I’d rather want the difference to be bigger, since I find it much more informative what the best-informed users think.’
This seems very strange to me. I accept that there’s some correlation between upvoted posters and epistemic rigour, but there’s a huge amount of noise, both in reasons for upvotes and in subject areas. EA includes a huge diversity of subject areas each requiring specialist knowledge. If I want to learn improv, I don’t go to a Fields Medalist winner or Pulitzer prize winning environmental journalist, so why should the equivalent be true on here?
I’d welcome topic-specific karma in principle, but I’m unsure how hard it is to implement/how much of a priority it is. And whether karma is topic-specific or not, I think that large differences in voting power increase accuracy and quality.
‘Personally I’d rather want the difference to be bigger, since I find it much more informative what the best-informed users think.’
This seems very strange to me. I accept that there’s some correlation between upvoted posters and epistemic rigour, but there’s a huge amount of noise, both in reasons for upvotes and in subject areas. EA includes a huge diversity of subject areas each requiring specialist knowledge. If I want to learn improv, I don’t go to a Fields Medalist winner or Pulitzer prize winning environmental journalist, so why should the equivalent be true on here?
I think that a fairly large fraction of posts is of a generalist nature. Also, my guess is that people with a large voting power usually don’t vote on topics they don’t know (though no doubt there are exceptions).
I’d welcome topic-specific karma in principle, but I’m unsure how hard it is to implement/how much of a priority it is. And whether karma is topic-specific or not, I think that large differences in voting power increase accuracy and quality.