Fortunately there's still plenty of people who overcome this bias. I've the dubious honour of writing the only post Eliezer's actually condemned as inappropriate for Less Wrong and should never have existed. I was afraid that would trigger a downgrade avalanche, but thanks to some excellent links others posted it maintained a positive score.

I wonder how much Yvain's rather high score of 31 has to do with EY's good review.

I've noticed this too, and that comments by higher status users, particularly Eliezer, tend to be voted higher than IMHO equal quality comments by less popular users...

power corrupting people?

...but it's hardly Eliezer's fault, if anything he goes out of his way to discourage this sort of thing.

It could also be a kind of unconscious Bayesian adjustment. If a comment is written by someone who tends to write high-quality comments, that increases the probability that this comment is high-quality from what you'd estimate just from reading the text. But I'd rather we didn't take that into account - we should mark comments based on own opinion of whether it's high quality, not our estimate of the probability of it being high-quality based on info like that, or the voting would resemble that of a Keynesian beauty contest.