Vote power should scale with karma
On group think: I think this worry can mostly be ignored if the elite-karma accounts have sufficiently diverse views. That being the case would mean that (a) diverse views aren’t obviously being punished and (b) to voters with the most individual leverage are less likely to all vote in the same direction. If they top karma accounts were all aligned in how they vote or were even colluding to suppress comments / posts, then the downsides of group-think would be more pronounced.
I guess It feels like this should be a testable claim: do the most upvoted posts / comments conform to the views of the highest karma users? Given how diverse the viewpoints are of the +5000 karma plus users (even just the top twenty), I’m not even sure their is a single coherent view among the karma-elite.
Among the karma-elite are a few OpenPhil / CEA accounts, whilst the second highest upvoted account is Habryka (arguably OpenPhil’s antichrist[1] and one of CEA’s largest critique).
I haven’t really thought about all the angles though and can imagine something like “the EA forum voting overly favours the bucket of people who have ~1000 karma and use the form everyday.”
Probably the risk of group-think is more dependant on who the forum users are, rather than the specific mechanics of the forum.
Is this not already the case? I.e. don’t the major EAGs already focus on specific cause areas?