Public expression of (dis)agreement creates emotional binding to beliefs and triggers some associated biases. Seeing how popular a belief is can bias people as well, functioning like an indirect argumentum ad populum. I would rather not know how much popular an opinion is; a well-reasoned disagreement or agreement accompanied by additional arguments are gladly accepted, but unsupported opinion expression ranges, in my opinion, from nearly worthless to actually harmful.
Now the popularity of certain beliefs can be discerned from the present karma system too, but still it doesn’t “officially” hold that highly upvoted post → probably true. The less explicit meaning karma has, the less likely it produces biases, or at least I think so.
Also, I agree with jimrandomh. To maintain that a post brings relevant, valid and good argument supporting X and simultaneously disagree with X seems irrational; rationalists are supposed to change their beliefs with new evidence. Upvoting an argument whose conclusion one doesn’t accept means either that one values sophistry, or that one has an opinion (enough strong to be willing to express it by voting) in spite of accepting arguments to the contrary. I can imagine few situations when that may be appropriate, but not enough to justify existence of two voting scales.
Public expression of (dis)agreement creates emotional binding to beliefs and triggers some associated biases. Seeing how popular a belief is can bias people as well, functioning like an indirect argumentum ad populum. I would rather not know how much popular an opinion is; a well-reasoned disagreement or agreement accompanied by additional arguments are gladly accepted, but unsupported opinion expression ranges, in my opinion, from nearly worthless to actually harmful.
Now the popularity of certain beliefs can be discerned from the present karma system too, but still it doesn’t “officially” hold that highly upvoted post → probably true. The less explicit meaning karma has, the less likely it produces biases, or at least I think so.
Also, I agree with jimrandomh. To maintain that a post brings relevant, valid and good argument supporting X and simultaneously disagree with X seems irrational; rationalists are supposed to change their beliefs with new evidence. Upvoting an argument whose conclusion one doesn’t accept means either that one values sophistry, or that one has an opinion (enough strong to be willing to express it by voting) in spite of accepting arguments to the contrary. I can imagine few situations when that may be appropriate, but not enough to justify existence of two voting scales.