Yes. Valuation is always subjective. The amount of respect one has in real life is also the belief of one's community.
Wow! then, this opens a whole Pandora's box of implications that I'll probably make a post about.
I disagree. It's possible that all 3 people are genuine and just have different views on what's needed.
If you read super carefully, you aren't actually dissagreing.
To say that: Its possible that all 3 people [voting for themselves] are genuine.
is equivalent to: In some cases all 3 people could be genuine.
which suggest that: In the rest of cases not all 3 people [voting for themselves] will be genuine.
which implies that In the rest of cases we can only be sure of the other 3 people [not voting for themselves] being genuine.
which is equivalent to: only 3 people out of 6 are surely [trying to measure the system impartially] being genuine.
Which is pretty much my initial sentence.
Now, my next sentence is crucial. If only 3 people are surely doing their job, then we have a probable 50% loss of measuring power for the most important level. Which leads me to answer your question.
Yes, of course. What's wrong?
The loss of measuring power in a first level unit. That's what's wrong. This loss will propagate as noise (in the optimistic case) to the following rounds. According to basic probability theory noise will not tend to cancel but add itself up. Sum, for example, two normally distributed variables. The variance of the result is the sum of the variances. Noise increases!
To put it more graphically, do you think Brendan Blumer would vote for himself in the first round? What about Do Kwon? How is it more likely that they make it to the second round? By allowing or by preventing them for voting themselves up? Now, suppose that they both make it to the second round. Do you think they will cancel each other or is it more likely that they affect the second round measurement?
What do you think about the noise of subsequent rounds?
Suppose you have a football tournament in which, with certain probability, some really bad players make to the second round and two the third and so on. How do you think will this affect the quality of the final match? What about its income?
Yes, I am disagreeing. You say, "only 3 people out of 6 are surely [trying to measure the system impartially]"
I'm saying, no such thing as impartial measurement. All 6 could be genuine. All 6 could be biased. Self-voting doesn't tell you anything certain about impartiality.
Anyway, I suspect much of your concerns will be alleviated when the UI makes it clear that there is no voting, there is only consensus.
Therein lies the ultimate reason of our disagreement, it seems.
You are thinking about impartiality as a binary quantity which is either true or false. From that perspective you are right. Self-voting doesn't imply any impartiality value.
On the contrary, I am thinking about impartiality as a probabilistic quantity that can take any continuum value in the [0; 1] interval. And I'm telling you that self-ranking affects the mean of this quantity.
People get really emotional when their reputation is at stake. There is tons of scientific research backing this. That emotion enters as noise in our system through the self-ranking door.