“I would strongly suspect humor doesn’t make you more rational/smarter/scientific, but is a fun grounds for playing around with strange ideas and patterns.”
Most humor (aside from physical comedy or a silly persona) seems to require deep verbal concept formation. Pointing out unexpected similarities based on the structures of ideas isn’t cognitively trivial; it means that the comedian is able to extract essential features across superficially different subjects.
Ya, that must be it. I’ve been on here for like 3 years (not with this account though) but only after the diaspora. Really excited that things are getting posted again. One major issue with such a system is that I now feel pressure to post popular content. A major feature of this community is that nothing is dismissed out of hand. You can propose anything you want so long as it’s supported by a sophisticated argument. The problem with only giving voting privileges to >x karma accounts is that people, like myself, will feel a pressure to post things that are generally accepted.
Now to be clear I’m not opposed to such a filter. I’ve personally noticed that for example, slatestarcodex doesn’t have the same consistently high quality comments as lesswrong. For example people will have comments like “what’s falsification?”etc. So I acknowledge that such a filter might be useful. At the same time however I’m pointing out one potential flaw with such a filter, that it lends itself to creating an echo-chamber.