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Wow. You're probably right that most people would have more impact focusing on local issues. Yet I don't care. The idea of going door-to-door campaigning for, I don't know, bicycle paths in Fairfax county, repels me. I don't want to admit that my life is so small and insignificant that that might be a good use of my time.

Perhaps engaging in national politics is like playing the lottery. It's a tiny chance to have a big impact. Or perhaps it's a very large chance of having an outcome which I can mentally claim an outsized portion of responsibility for.

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I’d admire you much more if you acted like this> I’d admire you much more if you acted like this...

I don't think you're credible here: you singled out Edward Snowden (who acted on an international scale) for praise as a hero.

The heroine of this piece (who goes unnamed--less acclaimed), having been unsuccessful, doesn't help your case for localism. Most problems can't be solved at the local level, as even the problem with doctors washing their hands proved unsolvable at that level.

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I've run lab experiments that worked find with three people, only one of which knew anything. The issue is having a question you want the answer to, and people who might know the answer.

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How small of an organization is too small to try prediction markets? 100? 50? 20? 10? 5?

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Give the winners of the predictions priority when allocating who gets to use the equipment.

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You mainly need a measure of the main outcome of interest, some relatively discrete choices to compare, and reasons to believe people aren't telling you relevant things they know.

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I am the de facto leader of a small recreational organization that, although managing several thousand USD worth of equipment for the benefit of its members, does not have revenue or distributable assets per se. How might a decision market be applied in the absence of a basic stream of divisible rewards? The psychological attraction of experimenting with a heterodox decision tool might hold sway for a while, but would most likely lose legitimacy and import over time or in moments of perturbation.

Small org decision markets would seem to operate like low market capitalization stocks, moving piece-wise instead of roughly continuously. The intermittent and/or sharply correcting positive/negative signals in such a regime would be unlikely to justify their overhead cognitive and administrative expense in comparison to the mundane and low-friction coalition politics that small organizations experience.

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