I would love to see a post on the rational behind the reputation system on this site.
Imagine a thousand professional philosophers would join lesswrong, or worse, a thousand creationists. If that happened, would someones karma score still reflect the persons rationality? I'm not saying that this is the case right now, since most people who don't agree with lesswrong won't join or bother to stay around for very long. But technically the lesswrong reputation system is susceptible to failure, it would just need one call by someone like P.Z. Myers to have thousands of mediocre rationalists, or trolls, join and start messing up the voting system.
But that's just the most obvious problem. The availability of a reputation system also discourages people to actually explain themselves by being able to let off steam or ignore cognitive dissonance by downvoting someone with a single mouse click. If people had to actually write a comment to voice their disagreement, everyone would benefit. The person who is wrong would benefit by being provided an actual explanation for why someone disagrees and therefore wouldn't be able to easily believe that the person who disagrees just doesn't like their opinion for irrational reasons. The person who disagrees would have to be more specific and maybe name some concrete reasons for their disagreement and that way notice that it might be them who is wrong or that their disagreement with the other person isn't as strong as they thought. Everyone else reading the conversation would be able to discern if all parties involved in the discussion actually understand each other or talk past each other.
Another problem is that a reputation system might drive away people with valuable insights about certain agreed upon topics. The initial population of a community might have been biased about something and the reputation system might provide a positive incentive to keep the bias and a negative incentive for those who disagree.
Another problem is that a reputation system might drive away people with valuable insights about certain agreed upon topics.
Relax, I doubt anyone with the ability to produce high-quality thinking is so insecure that (s)he'd be scared of getting a few downvotes on a website. (Myself, I once got an article submission voted to oblivion, but it just felt good in a feeling-of-superiority kind of way since I thought the LW community was the party being more wrong there -- though I think that to have found myself to be more wrong than I think I was would have ...
People who go back and downvote every post or comment a Less Wrong user has ever made, please, stop doing that. It's a clever way to pull information cascades in your direction but it is clearly an abuse of the content filtering system. It's also highly dishonorable. If you truly must use such tactics then downvoting a few of your enemy's top level posts is much less evil; your enemy loses the karma and takes the hint without your severely biasing the public perception of Less Wrong's discourse.
(I just lost over 200 karma in a few minutes and that'll probably continue for awhile. This happens to me every few weeks. Edit: I mean it's been happening every few weeks for a few months for a total of only three or four. Between 400 and 700 karma lost total I think? I don't mean to overstate the problem.)