Collecting information on the voting patterns of different categories of people might be useful. Having different things shown to different people based on what category they’re in, though? Ew, no.
Are you opposed to it because it’s divided along gender lines? Would you be more receptive to it if it was divided along, say, age lines, or proficiency in rationality lines?
If proficiency at rationality could be shown to be a single skill or a set of skills that are consistently improved on in an even way (so that there aren’t people who are very good at one kind of rationality and very bad at another), and if we had a reliable way of measuring that trait, that might be usefully used to weight votes, though it wouldn’t make sense for low-rationality people to see scores based on the votes of other low-rationality people rather than scores based on the votes of high-rationality people. I’m not confident of either of the premises, though.
I’m trying to understand where the bad is in this idea.
Are you maybe opposed to details of the implementation? Would you think the idea is bad if the option to filter out results is opt-in and explicitly stated? For example, offer users a “only use votes from teenagers when displaying data on the site” option, which they can enable or disable at will.
If it’s opt-in, explicitly stated, and not limited to groups that the user has declared themselves to be a member of, there’s probably no harm in it—it’d just be another kind of information.
Your original suggestion was missing some of those features, most notably the opt-in option.
Collecting information on the voting patterns of different categories of people might be useful. Having different things shown to different people based on what category they’re in, though? Ew, no.
Are you opposed to it because it’s divided along gender lines? Would you be more receptive to it if it was divided along, say, age lines, or proficiency in rationality lines?
If proficiency at rationality could be shown to be a single skill or a set of skills that are consistently improved on in an even way (so that there aren’t people who are very good at one kind of rationality and very bad at another), and if we had a reliable way of measuring that trait, that might be usefully used to weight votes, though it wouldn’t make sense for low-rationality people to see scores based on the votes of other low-rationality people rather than scores based on the votes of high-rationality people. I’m not confident of either of the premises, though.
In the other cases, no, it’s still a bad idea.
I’m trying to understand where the bad is in this idea.
Are you maybe opposed to details of the implementation? Would you think the idea is bad if the option to filter out results is opt-in and explicitly stated? For example, offer users a “only use votes from teenagers when displaying data on the site” option, which they can enable or disable at will.
If it’s opt-in, explicitly stated, and not limited to groups that the user has declared themselves to be a member of, there’s probably no harm in it—it’d just be another kind of information.
Your original suggestion was missing some of those features, most notably the opt-in option.