There are many interesting subtleties to voting and karma systems, such as the one we use here on HN. Another one is that a post that has a child that glorifies the parent "Great insight, bla.bla." will inevitably be voted up. You can probably find more if you look a bit.
You assume humans are rational beings and vote accordingly. But they aren't, they are emotional beasts that are hard to control, and are full of strange biases and ideas about what is right and wrong.
See for instance this list of cognitive biases from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Your paradox is explained by one of the biases listed, I'll leave it to you to figure out which one ;-)
When did I assume humans are rational beings and vote accordingly? What I was getting at is that widely accepted points get lots of upvotes as people express their agreement, but more controversial points get more of their upvotes because of the comment's quality. For the controversial points, this is offset by downvotes from people expressing disagreement. See gojomo's comment for a possible solution.
I'm not saying any voting system can be perfect, but this particular problem is explained by the fact that multiple judgments are being captured by a single voting axis, as gojomo said.
Reading my parent comment I see that it may look a bit arrogant, sorry that wasn't intentional, I merely think the topic is interesting, and hope to add some value to the conversation :-)
I think that basically what's going on here is that a simplistic voting system, such as the one we use here, and also one that carries more parameters and dimensions will always just be a simplistic overlay on an extremely nuanced and varied set of psychological rules that humans use for evaluating their surroundings, thus making it hard to accurately have karma map onto a users insightfullness (in lack of a better word) I'm pretty sure I could get a lot of karma by using psychology tricks to make people upvote me, but it wouldn't be very interesting. Or ethical for that matter.
So I absolutely agree with you: Karma isn't a measure of a users insightfullness, there's probably a correlation but it's weakened by a lot of parameters, such as the ones you describe, age of the account, and lots of other factors.
I agree; there's no perfect voting system. This is similar to what you said, but people getting lots of upvotes for saying something many others agree with probably means at least slightly fewer unpopular views are being posted.
Thanks for the welcome! I know the account is new but I've actually been here for a long time. :)
You assume humans are rational beings and vote accordingly. But they aren't, they are emotional beasts that are hard to control, and are full of strange biases and ideas about what is right and wrong.
See for instance this list of cognitive biases from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Your paradox is explained by one of the biases listed, I'll leave it to you to figure out which one ;-)
It's all about psychology.