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SoullessAutomaton comments on Open Thread: March 2009 - Less Wrong
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Well, let's look.
The top scoring articles seem to rated in the 50-60 range, indicating at least 60 users who have voted. Eliezer's articles seem to tend to be rated around 10-20, so that's probably closer to a 30% chance of upvoting. As far as I could tell none of the top three rated posts are by Eliezer. Yvain seems to be the most consistently highly rated poster overall, with typical scores seemingly ranging from 20-40. Since Yvain roughly mimics Eliezer's writing style and content, we could probably expect an unbiased rating of Eliezer's posts to be similar. All around, as a very rough approximation, we can say that Eliezer's posts are getting an upvote penalty of 50%.
Take all that as you will.
I'd imagine there is a name. Whatever it is, I consistently fall prey to it with most intuitive self-evaluations (comparing myself mostly to groups of which I am not a representative member).
One thing you don't mention is that Yvain's posts and writing style are simpler and easier to comprehend than Eliezer's. Yvain has also presented some posts on fairly basic topics that are probably familiar to most longtime OB readers but are new to readers just joining LW. [EDIT: I retract the last point. I was thinking of the 'priming' post and that there were others like this on basic heuristics and biases topics, but that seems like the only one.]
That is not to say that there's not also some bias. I think many of us probably consciously or unconsciously hold Eliezer to much higher standards than anybody else.
All the recent talk about cults and cult-like behavior has probably made some people more hesitant to vote up anything by Eliezer as well.
Not to be contrary, but I actually find Eliezer's posts easier to comprehend, partly due to better structure and pacing, partly due to a typical slightly higher informational content holding my attention better. I suspect this is mostly a function of Eliezer having more practice, and of my own short attention span, heh.
I was going to say that I expect the cultishness discussion to be more directly relevant to the upvoting penalty, but looking quickly at post scores doesn't seem to support that theory.