Let me make sure I understand correctly what you mean in light of what pg said about the reasons for the current experiment (quoted in my post to which you reply). Is it simply a mistake to say that high comment scores on comments that are mean or dumb is a problem? I ask, because pg has said that there has been a recent problem with comment scores.

One of the big assumptions that's being made here is that people are dumb calculators.

I think that there is a huge body of research showing that all human beings, without exception, high-IQ or low-IQ, are "cognitive misers"

http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Cognitive_Miser

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/11/04/...

(there is a good self-test at the link above)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ey/a_taxonomy_of_bias_the_cognitive...

in the sense of preferring less effort-demanding problem-solving techniques to more accurate, but more effort-demanding, techniques. Snap judgments spare mental effort for everything else that we are busy with.

Here on HN, the only thing most participants contribute to the community is good comments and good submissions and votes about other participants' submissions and comments. A few founders, pg and his core of curators (editors),

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

do actual work to keep the site running, and they get the best compensation for their volunteer efforts if all the signals about story quality and comment quality are true, thoughtful signals rather than noise.