Thanks for this succinct explanation. It bears many similarities to problems of politics and governance that I wrestle with.

I wonder to what extent crowd work can be effective for making real progress; I've been impressed by things like FoldIt and astronomical classifiers (as opposed to the BOINC distributed processing approach) but I don't know to what extent those result in real progress vs useful-but-limited stamp collection. I am very interested in the possibilities for gamification but it seems like there's a big gap between the empirical data collection/space mapping aspect and actual theoretical development of the kind done at the Santa Fe institute or the IAS.