You said: “Downvoted because I think “more active on the forum for a longer time” may be a good proxy for “well informed about what other forum posters think” (and even that’s doubtful), but is a bad proxy for “well informed about reality”.”
I pointed out that the second paragraph in my comment made clear that I think that quantity of comments/posts (what you call “more active on the forum for a longer time”) is a distorting factor. Thus, we seem to be in agreement on this point, which made your objection/downvote unclear to me.
Your new comment doesn’t seem to address 2, but makes an unrelated point.
This wasn’t an unrelated point, but I’ll try to make my argument more explicit.
Your original comment said:
Personally I’d rather want the difference to be bigger [than having 3 times the voting power], since I find it much more informative what the best-informed users think.
and your second paragraph implied that by “best-informed” you still mean something that’s measurable from their forum stats.
What I’m saying is this is not a good idea, regardless of whether you mean the current or an “improved” metric, since being actually best informed probably has close to nothing to do with any of those, and you’ll just end up amplifying unwanted effects.
More generally, the idea that we can objectively and consistently judge which users are most useful to all other users—or which will have a predictably higher impact if their votes are listened to—seems wrong to me. The prioritisation ideas that we apply to e.g. global health interventions may only be very weakly applicable to discourse.
The dialectic was as follows:
You said: “Downvoted because I think “more active on the forum for a longer time” may be a good proxy for “well informed about what other forum posters think” (and even that’s doubtful), but is a bad proxy for “well informed about reality”.”
I pointed out that the second paragraph in my comment made clear that I think that quantity of comments/posts (what you call “more active on the forum for a longer time”) is a distorting factor. Thus, we seem to be in agreement on this point, which made your objection/downvote unclear to me.
Your new comment doesn’t seem to address 2, but makes an unrelated point.
This wasn’t an unrelated point, but I’ll try to make my argument more explicit.
Your original comment said:
and your second paragraph implied that by “best-informed” you still mean something that’s measurable from their forum stats.
What I’m saying is this is not a good idea, regardless of whether you mean the current or an “improved” metric, since being actually best informed probably has close to nothing to do with any of those, and you’ll just end up amplifying unwanted effects.
More generally, the idea that we can objectively and consistently judge which users are most useful to all other users—or which will have a predictably higher impact if their votes are listened to—seems wrong to me. The prioritisation ideas that we apply to e.g. global health interventions may only be very weakly applicable to discourse.
OK, thanks for explaining your reasoning.
On the object level issue, maybe we’ll have to agree to disagree. Fwiw I don’t think the karma system has to be perfect to be useful.