that makes it more difficult to vote such posts out of the forum than similar posts without the rule, thus making expected quality introduced by these posts lower than average.
That's the whole point. The objective of these threads is not to "introduce quality" (and Karma does not measure quality, but popularity, which unfortunately isn't always the same thing); it's simply to have fun. Lots of people are turned off this blog because they find us stuffy, self-important, and unwelcoming. Having threads that encourage another kind of attitude is, I feel, downright healthy.
In fact, I have half a mind to change the next experiment from "don't downvote or upvote" to "please downvote or upvote according to niceness and civility, not "quality" or "intelligence". I want there to be spaces in LW where people aren't being snippy at each other, and where the response to a post you don't approve of but can't be bothered to actually argue against is to down-vote it.
There is only one circumstance in which I for one ever consider downvoting someone, and it's if I feel they're being unreasonable on purpose; wilfully ignorant, or deliberately and smugly obnoxious. I don't down-vote on mistakes, beginner's ignorance, or stupidity.
Edit: I hereby declare this subthread a special meta-discussion exception to which the anti-feedback rules don't apply :-)
Please don't do that retroactively; you're violating tacit consent. If you'd done that from the start, I wouldn't have replied to you in the first place, because I you and I have very different criteria for what merits an upvote or a downvote, and any interaction between you and me will turn to my disadvantage.
In fact, I find the entirety of the karma system insanely dangerous, and would merit a discussion thread of its own. Supposing your attitude annoyed me sufficiently, what's to stop me from searching your post history and downvoting every single post you ever wrote under this handle at LW? I would never do that, because I think that would be evil and I don't like to think of myself as evil,. but you only have my word for it. In fact, what's to stop you from downvoting every single post I make, simply on the grounds that you don't want someone like me on this blog?
"Karmassassination" does happen occasionally, but it's limited to an extent by having available downvotes be a function of the downvoter's karma.
This is my first attempt at starting a casual conversation on LW where people don't have to worry about winning or losing points, and can just relax and have social fun together.
So, Big Bang Theory. That series got me wondering. It seems to be about "geeks", and not the basement-dwelling variety either; they're highly successful and accomplished professionals, each in their own field. One of them has been an astronaut, even. And yet, everything they ever accomplish amounts to absolutely nothing in terms of social recognition or even in terms of personal happiness. And the thing is, it doesn't even get better for their "normal" counterparts, who are just as miserable and petty.
Consider, then; how would being rationalists would affect the characters on this show? The writing of the show relies a lot on laughing at people rather than with them; would rationalist characters subvert that? And how would that rationalist outlook express itself given their personalities? (After all, notice how amazingly different from each other Yudkowsky, Hanson, and Alicorn are, just to name a few; they emphasize rather different things, and take different approaches to both truth-testing and problem-solving).
Note: this discussion does not need to be about rationalism. It can be a casual, normal discussion about the series. Relax and enjoy yourselves.
But the reason I brought up that series is that its characters are excellent examples of high intelligence hampered by immense irrationality. The apex of this is represented by Dr. Sheldon Cooper, who is, essentially, a complete fundamentalist over every single thing in his life; he applies this attitude to everything, right down to people's favorite flavor of pudding: Raj is "axiomatically wrong" to prefer tapioca, because the best pudding is chocolate. Period. This attitude makes him a far, far worse scientist than he thinks, as he refuses to even consider any criticism of his methods or results.