My main intuition against: I think that the value that an arbitrary researcher gives to a field is highly heavy tailed, whereby a few key people move the whole field forward, and so we want clear indicators of who those people are, and to listen to them.
My main intuition for, however, is that the whole premise of arbital is that you can get value from increasing the communication quality in the whole network, which is what increasing the quality of evidence available is (this isn't a product aimed at the few, it's like wikipedia, which gets its value from raising the whole level of discourse).
At a first pass I'm weakly in agreement, but not sure that one is significantly more valuable than the other (or that they necessarily require trading-off).
Comments
Andrea Gallagher
Good catch about reputation being critical. Perhaps I should remove that, since I'd like to see reputation systems, but have them depend on broad data (including claims, evidence, voting, etc).