I will not discuss it further, to avoid who knows who, who does not permit a shadow of a doubt in "settled topics" like Goedel's theorems or Climate change or anything and downvotes accordingly.
If you do challenge the mainstream position in a "settled topic" your post should be longer than one sentence.
I have personally never read the proof of Gödel's theorem. I believe that it works because I trust in the authority of the mathematical community. I don't know to which extend the property of finitness is important for the proof. If you make such a claim in a "settled topics", it's your burden to explain to me why it's important.
If I read that discussion I come away with thinking that JoshuaZ knows what he's talking about. I ...
Several people posted recently in a thread on women, mostly espousing feminist views - only to find that someone had declined to respond to their post, but instead browsed their history and downvoted every single comment or article they had ever posted.
I have two questions:
1. Why would you come to a site like this and pollute the karma system? How does it make you smarter? How does it make anyone else on the site smarter?
2. What would be a good technical workaround? In my mind, some system that detects mass-downvoting and flags a user for review would be preferable, but what should happen then? Should the system be more lenient to higher-karma posters? Who should perform the review process? What should be done with those whom the reviewer ascertains are abusing the karma system? I would prefer some kind of lesson that is more corrective than retributive - it seems to me that people who would perform this behavior are exactly the sort of people who need some of the lessons that this site provides. Any ideas?