I’m not sure this is a good idea. If there’s something that empirically makes us look like we’re not being rational we should deal with that issue. Hiding that data is not a good solution.
However, I do have to wonder what in general the point of having the top contributors is. I’m not even sure that total karma is a useful metric of much since one person could have much higher quality comments than another but most much more rarely and yet the person with high quality comments presumably should receive more attention and their comments should be more closely paid attention to. It might be nice to have a display of average karma, not just total karma. However, this would still I suspect give Clippy a fairly high karma, so if you object to Clippy this won’t solve anything. Also note that many upvotes are are not connected to the quality of remarks in any strong sense. See for example this comment by Eliezer that is now at +53 which is presumably connected to the unique status that Eliezer has as the founder of LW.
A simple fix would be to not bother publishing a top contributors list.
I’m not sure this is a good idea. If there’s something that empirically makes us look like we’re not being rational we should deal with that issue. Hiding that data is not a good solution.
However, I do have to wonder what in general the point of having the top contributors is. I’m not even sure that total karma is a useful metric of much since one person could have much higher quality comments than another but most much more rarely and yet the person with high quality comments presumably should receive more attention and their comments should be more closely paid attention to. It might be nice to have a display of average karma, not just total karma. However, this would still I suspect give Clippy a fairly high karma, so if you object to Clippy this won’t solve anything. Also note that many upvotes are are not connected to the quality of remarks in any strong sense. See for example this comment by Eliezer that is now at +53 which is presumably connected to the unique status that Eliezer has as the founder of LW.