> Just about any economist or rational person will tell you these are a huge boon to the world True, but I think said people still haven't taken the whole Tale

> Just about any economist or rational person will tell you these are a huge boon to the world True, but I think said people still haven't taken the whole Taleb idea to heart. I'm pretty sure there are certain domains where the wisdom of the crowd is no wiser then a chimp throwing darts. As an extreme example, assume you ran a prediction market that predicted the value of the s&p500 x days from now. Would you expect to make money based on these predictions? This is not to say that they can't be useful in certain domains. It is well known that they do well for binary outcomes like sport events and elections. They might also be valuable in situations where there are behavioural factors that prevent the spread of information (e.g. whether a project will finish on time). However, there might be simpler mechanisms (like whistle blowing) which could solve the problem or it might not be a problem at all (Bent Flyvbjerg's research on mega projects suggests reliable forecasts are simply undesirable and "true" forecasts are known sub rosa anyway) A relaxation of the law or more exemptions a la IEM could be beneficial from a research perspective, but I wouldn't expect a "huge boon" just because. These are a lot of words to basically say, it's not a black and white issue.