I think stuff EY says gets double digit votes with only limited exceptions, and I don't think it would matter much what he said as long as it was spelled right and generally on-topic. I think EY says a lot of interesting shit in highly interesting ways, but many of the vote counts for his comments are based of the fact he is a celebrity around here.

I think this is... well, half right. I've seen plenty of Eliezer comments with zero, near-zero, or negative karma; his less contentful comments tend to stay around zero where they should be, and the negative ones tend to be a lot more negative than I'd expect them to be from their content. On the other hand, when he posts something insightful, he also tends to get voted up more than I'd expect from the content. Same goes for Lukeprog, Yvain, and the other high-karma users (though I can't recall ever seeing a negative-karma Yvain post, now that I think about it).

In other words, I suspect that community status serves as an amplifier rather than a scalar bonus. Since almost everyone has a positive karma balance, though, this hashes out to a positive effect on average.

(Incidentally, I have met a lot of the high-karma users in the flesh, but I don't think it affects my votes much on average. I think that in most cases I treat their meat presence and their online persona as quasi-separate entities in my mind.)