Furthermore, it assumes excellent judgement on the part of the closers, who by definition don't have the full context. They are confident in imagining that a particular question will accumulate bad answers etc, but do they have any data to demonstrate that their imagination is any good? It may be, but then again, it may not be. It's not like no one has ever had bad judgement before.
So it might be useful to bias the site toward leaving questions open, and let people make weighted votes for closing. Initially, the weight of a vote would be zero. This would allow the quality of an individual's judgement to be established, and their vote given more weight as it proved to be more predictive of whether or not an issue was eventually closed.
Totally. I do come across duplicates and bad questions which necessarily must be closed, but I always do my best to help solve the problem that the human on the other end of the question is experiencing via the comments. There are rules, mostly good, mostly in need of enforcement to keep quality up, and I think they work in the individual human context.
There's a balance of rights / responsibilities, and if you have the right to closevote questions and earn magical rep points, you have the responsibility to explain why and try to help.
Herd-mentality and behaviour (demonstrated as closevote requests) seem like the opposite of this.
This is a fantasic point. My highest rated most viewed question was one that I thought was stupid when I asked it. 5 years later it has tons of votes answers and backlinks.
So it might be useful to bias the site toward leaving questions open, and let people make weighted votes for closing. Initially, the weight of a vote would be zero. This would allow the quality of an individual's judgement to be established, and their vote given more weight as it proved to be more predictive of whether or not an issue was eventually closed.