You cheated. You're comparing "insightful-sounding questions" to "genuinely insightful answers". Of course the genuine answers are going to come out ahead. That's completely unfair to the suggestion. But, assuming that people on LessWrong actually have the ability to distinguish between insightful-sounding questions and genuinely insightful questions (which seems just as easy as distinguishing between insightful-sounding answers and genuinely insightful answers, btw) the proposal makes sense.
Your comment does not contain an argument. It contains a blatantly flawed framing of the proposal I put forward and a catchphrase, "perverse incentives", and you don't explain the thought that goes into that catchphrase. You never articulate what the actual impact of these perverse incentives would look like, or how these perverse incentives would arise. Do you anticipate that if more people upvoted questions we would end up with fewer good results? I do not see how such an outcome would occur. I see zero reason to believe the "perverse incentives" you reference would originate.
There's a huge tendency within academia to ignore anything with partial solutions or doubts or blank spaces, and to undervalue questioning. Questions are inherently low status because they explicitly reveal a large gap of knowledge that cannot easily be overcome by the asker, and also have an element of submission to the "more intelligent" person who will answer the question. My suggestion is designed to counterbalance that. The best way to maximize the number of insightful thoughts and results you have is to ask insightful questions, that seems like a very reasonable assumption to me.
Moreover, putting forth the question which took place at an earlier point in the thought process allows others to more easily understand whatever conclusions you may or may not reach. It also allows people to take that question along different avenues of thought to reach useful conclusions that you would not have even considered.
Now, clearly we don't want to ask questions for the sake of asking questions. But good questions are extremely important and should be encouraged. Upvoting more questions than usual and asking more questions as a general rule is therefore a good idea. The proposal can be selectively applied by the intelligent commenters of LessWrong, and none of the "perverse incentives" you envision will occur or do any damage to the site.
"Perverse incentives" isn't a LW catchphrase. It's a term from economics, used to describe situations where external changes in the incentive structure around some good you want to maximize actually end up maximizing something else at its expense. This often happens when the thing you wanted to maximize is hard to quantify or has a lot of prerequisites, making it easier to encourage things by proxy -- which sometimes works, but can also distort markets. Goodhart's law is a special case. I'd assumed this was a ubiquitous enough concept that I ...
I'm worried that LW doesn't have enough good contrarians and skeptics, people who disagree with us or like to find fault in every idea they see, but do so in a way that is often right and can change our minds when they are. I fear that when contrarians/skeptics join us but aren't "good enough", we tend to drive them away instead of improving them.
For example, I know a couple of people who occasionally had interesting ideas that were contrary to the local LW consensus, but were (or appeared to be) too confident in their ideas, both good and bad. Both people ended up being repeatedly downvoted and left our community a few months after they arrived. This must have happened more often than I have noticed (partly evidenced by the large number of comments/posts now marked as written by [deleted], sometimes with whole threads written entirely by deleted accounts). I feel that this is a waste that we should try to prevent (or at least think about how we might). So here are some ideas: