Thanks for the tip about "showdead". I totally agree that there's a big danger, if one follows the strategy I described, of personal bias making one confuse "intelligent" with "what I want to be true" or with "what I enjoy because it is contrarian". However, I am aware of this danger and work to mitigate it in various ways. Also, I should mention that I don't think that grayed-out comments are 0.5 likely to be highly intelligent - I'd say it's more like about 0.1 or 0.2. Overall, I think that the benefit of prioritizing grayed-out comments, to me, has been worth it so far.
But since this is how like to you read HN, you really should know about the 'showdead' option in your profile. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.