A reputation system necessarily favors status quo.
This community are mostly aspired rationalists, not professionals in philosophy/decision theory/psychology, though there are a number of experts around. Accuracy of technical posts is hard to judge, so people probably go by the post quality, their gut feeling and how well it conforms to what has been agreed upon as correct before. Plus the usual points for humor. Minus penalty for poor spelling/grammar/style.
An example of a reputation system that works for a technical forum is MathOverflow, though partly because the mods are quite ruthless there about off-topic posts.
I am quite sure that a lot of valuable opinions are lost due to the current reputation system
...which likely means that this forum is not the right one for them. LW is open enough to resist “evaporative cooling”, and rapid downvoting inhibits all but expert trolling.
gives incentive to write posts about basic rationality rather than tackling important problems collaboratively.
I think that is the idea. Educating people “about basic rationality” is a much more viable goal than doing basic research collaboratively. LW is often used as a sounding board for research write-ups, but that is probably as far as it can go. Anything more would require excluding amateurs from the discussion, to reduce the noise level. I am yet to see a public forum where “important problems” are solved “collaboratively”. Feel free to provide counterexamples.
A reputation system necessarily favors status quo.
This community are mostly aspired rationalists, not professionals in philosophy/decision theory/psychology, though there are a number of experts around. Accuracy of technical posts is hard to judge, so people probably go by the post quality, their gut feeling and how well it conforms to what has been agreed upon as correct before. Plus the usual points for humor. Minus penalty for poor spelling/grammar/style.
An example of a reputation system that works for a technical forum is MathOverflow, though partly because the mods are quite ruthless there about off-topic posts.
...which likely means that this forum is not the right one for them. LW is open enough to resist “evaporative cooling”, and rapid downvoting inhibits all but expert trolling.
I think that is the idea. Educating people “about basic rationality” is a much more viable goal than doing basic research collaboratively. LW is often used as a sounding board for research write-ups, but that is probably as far as it can go. Anything more would require excluding amateurs from the discussion, to reduce the noise level. I am yet to see a public forum where “important problems” are solved “collaboratively”. Feel free to provide counterexamples.