Would a reputation system cause the Tea Party movement to become less wrong?

Yes. They would still have their major shibboleths like Obama being a Muslim born in Kenya, but reputation systems would at least reduce the most mouth-breathing comments.

The n-Category Café or Timothy Gowers blog do not employ a reputation system like less wrong. It's the people who make places better off than others.

People are a factor. People are not the only factor which is solely determinative. Code is Law.

I am quite sure that a lot of valuable opinions are lost due to the current reputation system because there are a lot of people who don't like the idea of being voted down according to unknown criteria rather than engaging in argumentative discourses.

And that is why LW has orders of magnitude less comments and posts than OB or SL4 did. Wait, never mind, I meant 'more'.

This does discourage rigor and gives incentive to write posts about basic rationality rather than tackling important problems collaboratively.

Or it discourages attempts to bamboozle with rigor. I don't remember terribly many rigorous proofs on LW, but then, I don't remember terribly many on OB or SL4 either.