The way I internalize it: public voting selects for layman plausibility, not correctness.
Because laymen massively outnumber experts, the layman vote always overwhelms the informed one, so the reaction of people who don’t know the subject is the only thing that matters. Truth only seems to matter because most subjects either can be somewhat intuited by non-experts, or are in a niche that you’re not, so “layman plausibility” means your reaction, too. But the true nature of the dialog reveals itself as soon as people talk about something you’re an expert on.
Answers like this aren’t a bug in a truth machine, they’re a plausibility machine working as designed.
Because laymen massively outnumber experts, the layman vote always overwhelms the informed one, so the reaction of people who don’t know the subject is the only thing that matters. Truth only seems to matter because most subjects either can be somewhat intuited by non-experts, or are in a niche that you’re not, so “layman plausibility” means your reaction, too. But the true nature of the dialog reveals itself as soon as people talk about something you’re an expert on.
Answers like this aren’t a bug in a truth machine, they’re a plausibility machine working as designed.