Related to Information Cascades
Information Cascades has implied that people's votes are being biased by the number of votes already cast. Similarly, some commenters express a perception that higher status posters are being upvoted too much.
If, like me, you suspect that you might be prone to these biases, you can correct for them by installing LessWrong anti-kibitzer which I hacked together yesterday morning. You will need Firefox with the greasemonkey extention installed. Once you have greasemonkey installed, clicking on the link to the script will pop up a dialog box asking if you want to enable the script. Once you enable it, a button which you can use to toggle the visibility of author and point count information should appear in the upper right corner of any page on LessWrong. (On any page you load, the authors and pointcounts are automatically hidden until you show them.) Let me know if it doesn't work for any of you.
Already, I've had some interesting experiences. There were a few comments that I thought were written by Eliezer that turned out not to be (though perhaps people are copying his writing style.) There were also comments that I thought contained good arguments which were written by people I was apparently too quick to dismiss as trolls. What are your experiences?
If the main Less Wrong codebase offered an option to hide the names of contributors and non-negative karma point totals (because negatives you may want to let your eyes just skip over), not revealing them until voted on (including a neutral vote)...
...then what would you think of only giving half a karma point for any votes made without obscuring the name and current total? (Likewise any votes changed after the reveal.) Fair? Or just annoying?
The half-point idea is an interesting one. I find it hard to think of genuinely good reasons for wanting to know how positive a score is before deciding whether to vote up or not, and I haven't heard any good explanations from anybody else yet either. That's to be contrasted with the multitude of bad reasons for wanting to know the score beforehand, which exploit common cognitive biases that we are all at least partially subject to. I do find the idea a bit heavy-handed, but I think it would make the community slightly less herd-like and a bit more rational.
Of course, you'd also have to change the code base so that once an initial blind vote has been made, any further changes would only register at the lower value.
As to whether it's unfair, you could explain it as getting an EXTRA half point for your willingness to make a small sacrifice for the betterment of the community at large. You could even make it 1 point versus 1.5 points.