> If you don’t like this state of affairs join me in trying to develop a more reliable consensus mechanism on such topics: prediction markets.

It would be great if people were rewarded or punished based on the eventual utility and correctness of their statements rather than their immediate appeal. In a sense people are using their reputation as a currency in a prediction market of sorts just by recording their thoughts and opinions publicly. In the future this information should be easy to aggregate. You could imagine a public 'credibility score' much like a credit score. In this current debate it seems there will be substantial loss of reputation for those you nail their colours to the wrong mast.