[corruption]

There are many papers in psychology dealing with the influence of prestige on statement credibility. It does have a large effect and is replicated across many studies.

Whether or not you want your prestige to influence your statement credibility is entirely personal. I'd rather have it not effect it to keep myself honest.

[Zev]

If this was that big of a deal for an online site in which you say whether you like something or not, I'd have thought that sites would hide the username from everyone until you voted on a comment/story/etc. However, in practice, its not that big of a deal. pg hasn't even experimented with it on HN afaik - and on some level, I generally think of HN as his personal experiment sandbox (either for how people behave, UI/UX or for Arc).

[corruption]

I propose an experiment rather than making an assumption that it's not important.

Randomly change the username on new posts from users that have a low average points per post (ppp)to a top 20 user in terms of ppp.

If there is no effect of username on ppp, then the difference between the users true average ppp and the randomly assigned one will be large, if there is an effect it will be approximately zero. We could test this statistically easily enough.

What say you pg?

[jacquesm]

That's a really clever idea.

[jacquesm]

There are a few people here who have 'reputations', Paul Graham of course the #1 contender for that, and I think I can see a bit of what you mean in the voting patterns around what he writes, but on the whole it is not enough to be a source of worry.

[corruption]

Dismissing experimentally validated research out of hand because you personally don't want it to be true is not critical thinking, it's wishful thinking.

[jacquesm]

I didn't 'dismiss it', I just said that even if it is true I don't see it as a real problem. Unless you attribute a large importance to voting. It's not like you can take your karma to the bank.

If I did want to dismiss it I'd have said that HN possibly has a better attitude towards this than a random sample used in an experiment, but I figure HN is large enough now that such an effect if established as real will be present here too.

[corruption]

I'm trained with the school of thought that says "Everything before the but is ..." you can guess the rest. Read your comment with that in mind :)

I really like the voting - it's good to know when you have said something stupid. Either everyone else is wrong or you are, and the latter is pretty unlikely :)

[jacquesm]

Well, maybe we didn't go to the same school then ;)

There are no words in the English language that should be dismissed with prejudice, but is one of those.

I'm not a 'native' speaker (or writer), the dutch for 'but' is 'maar', and it indicates a modification of the first part of the sentence, a qualifier.

It does not negate the preceding part but it detracts from it, so I mean that to read (and I'll try to avoid the use of 'but')

I take your word for the research, HN will have some of that that, given the general level of discourse here and having read extensively in both articles written by HN'ers and the comments I have yet to see your point proven but it is bound to be true to some extent.

Better like that? ;)

[corruption]

Much :)

We are now quibbling over magnitudes, which is moot since there is no data either way.

[JangoSteve]

In my experience on HN, up- and down-voting has little to do with right and wrong. It has to do with (a) whether or not you've contributed valuable food for thought and (b) whether or not the masses agree with your opinion.

And keeping (b) in mind, realize that it is often those opinions of an individual that conflict with the masses that contribute largely to the individual's greater-than-average success.