If you're reading this, Kurige, you should very quickly say the above out loud, so you can notice that it seems at least slightly harder to swallow - notice the subjective difference - before you go to the trouble of rerationalizing.

There seems to be some confusion here concerning authority. I have the authority to say "I like the color green." It would not make sense for me to say "I believe I like the color green" because I have first-hand knowledge concerning my own likes and dislikes and I'm sufficiently confident in my own mental capacities to determine whether or not I'm deceiving myself concerning so simple a matter as my favorite color.

I do not have the authority to say, "Jane likes the color green." I may know Jane quite well, and the probability of my statement being accurate may be quite high, but my saying it is so does not make it so.

I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existance of God.

Critical realism shows us that the world and our perception of the world are two different things. Ideally any rational thinker should have a close correlation between their perception of the world and reality, but outside of first-hand knowledge they are never equivalent.

You are correct - it is harder for me to say "God exists" than it is for me to say "I believe God exists" for the same reason it is harder for a scientist to say "the higgs-boson exists" than it is to say "according to our model, the higgs-boson should exist."

The scientist has evidence that such a particle exists, and may strongly believe in it's existence, but he does not have the authority to say definitively that it exists. It may exists, or not exist, independent of any such belief.

The reason why saying "There is a God and He instilled..." is harder than saying "I believe that there is a God and He instilled..." is because the words "I believe that" are weasel words. The literal meaning of "I believe that" is irrelevant; any other weasel words would have the same effect. Consider the same sentence, but replace "I believe that" with "It is likely that", or "Evidence indicates that", or any similar phrase, and it's just as easy.

Just because people are aware of a concept, and have words which ought to refer to that concept, does not mean that they consistently connect the two. The best example of this comes from the way people refer to things as [good] and [bad]. When people dislike something, but don't know why, they generate exemplars of the concept "bad", and call it evil, ugly, or stupid. This same mechanism lead to the widespread use of "gay" as a synonym for "bad", and to racial slurs directed at anonymous online rivals who are probably the wrong race for the slur. I think that confidence markers are subject to the same linguistic phenomenon.

People think with sentences like "That's a [good] car" or "[Weasel] God exists". The linguistic parts of their mind expand them to "That's a sweet car" and "I believe God exists" when speaking, and performs the inverse operation when listening. They don't think about how the car tastes, and they don't think about beliefs, even though literal interpretation of what they say would indicate that they do.

Exactly. It seems unlikely that prestigious researchers will be unable to publish their brilliant but unconventional idea because they can't fully utilize their fame to sway editors. In fact, prestigious researchers have exactly what is needed to ensure their idea will take hold if it has merit: job security. They have plenty of time to nurture and develop their idea until it is accepted.

The endpoints 1,2 and 4 are more or less equivalent; they are worth repeating though. There isn't really any worth in a score of votes on the true quality, at least not for bayesians. A score of votes on individual judgments would contain all useful information.

A thought experiment: You could use a double voting system: you make one vote on your beliefs before updating on the consensus and another vote in a separate count on your updated belief. The point would be to update on the consensus of the first vote count and use the second vote count for all other purposes, eg. promoting on the front page. This would allow broadcasting of each persons novel evidence (their individual judgement) as well as keeping some kind of aggregate score for the sites algorithms to work with. It would probably be easy to create an algorithm that makes full use of the first score though and as long as one can't think of a good use of the second count, one shouldn't vote on ones updated beliefs in a single vote system I guess.

A minor point about the calculations: An ideal bayesian wouldn't do the calculation you did. Knowing the voting procedure, they would dismiss any votes not contributing new information. As the order of the votes isn't public, they would have to keep a prior for the different orders and update on that. This is of course a minor quibble as this would lead to far too much calculations to be a reasonable model for any real reader.