This is a fantastic book and explains most of the questions currently in the thread about the circumstances where large groups of people produce more effective answers than any one of its members and the cases where they do not. If this article was interesting it is worth reading.
The book also briefly covers the Policy Analysis Market, a program to experiment with using a futures market to help predict terrorist attacks. As this program used real money, and offered the opportunity to make money off of terrorist attacks, some members of Congress were outraged and the program was immediately cancelled (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3106559.stm). This version discussed in this NPR article seems more publicly palatable. In fact, it looks like the similarity was already reported: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/21/nation/la-na-cia-cro...
By the way, can anyone recommend a more rigorous book than Wisdom of Crowds on this subject?
This one [1] is recommended by the guys behind the Radio Lab podcast (specific episode [2]). I left the referral tag on it since it'll go to help them produce more great radio.
