One of the reasons I like crowd prediction is that it seems to be slowly leading to well distributed groups of people who are able to make educated guesses even

One of the reasons I like crowd prediction is that it seems to be slowly leading to well distributed groups of people who are able to make educated guesses even with one or two conditionals. While governments have professional analysts, they don't do all that much better than chance even on direct predictions and then what they do share with the public is filtered by their biased interests. Not only do we not know, for example, if the chaos after an accelerated arab spring was a better outcome from the perspective of maintaining western financial/political interests at a cost of preventing a more gradual transition into stable democracies. But more importantly, we also don't know if government analysts had that hypothesis and they still chose to interfere. Personally, I don't think western democracies will continue to function with that type of secrecy of knowledge combined with increasing computational modeling/prediction capabilities.