Good question. I'd like to generalize it: in the absence of a reason why "creating a law" and "sapient beings" would change the answer, we can ask: when making a decision about some entities X<sub>i</sub>, after you've added in prediction markets to get all of the information that anybody has, what remains to be gained by using a decision procedure P that asymmetrically treat the X<sub>i</sub> in a way based not on predicted outcomes?
-The answer is: nothing—but with two major caveats having to do with how the power of prediction markets is precisely that they're agnostic about how traders make decisions: we assume that whatever the winning decision is, greedy traders have an incentive to figure it out.
+The answer is: nothing—albeit with two caveats having to do with how the power of prediction markets is precisely that they're agnostic about how traders make decisions: we assume that whatever the winning decision is, greedy traders have an incentive to figure it out.
-Nothing is gained—_if_ you already happen to have sufficiently liquid prediction markets covering all the decisions you need to make. This is logistically nontrivial, and almost certainly much more computationally intensive. (If there are a hundred traders in your market, each of them using their own decision procedure which is on average as expensive as P, then delegating the decision to the market costs Society a hundred times as much as just using P yourself.)
+Nothing is gained—_if_ you already happen to have sufficiently liquid prediction markets covering all the decisions you need to make. This is logistically nontrivial, and almost certainly much more computationally intensive. (If there are a hundred traders in your market, each of them using their own decision procedure which is on average as expensive as P, then delegating the decision to the market costs Society a hundred times as much as just using P once yourself.)
Nothing is gained—_but_ this can't be an argument against P being a good decision procedure, as the reason we can assume that the market will never underperform P is _because_ traders are free to use P themselves if it happens to be the best procedure. (It would be misleading to say that Society doesn't need to compute P because it has prediction markets, if, "under the hood", the traders in the market are in fact computing P all the time.)
(Okay, this one is a little bit silly, but it's illustrative.)
-Imagine implementing a sorting algorithm for the standard library of your new programming language. Should you use merge sort? Quicksort?
+Imagine being a programmer needing to implement a sorting algorithm for some application: code that takes a list of numbers, and rearranges it to be ordered smallest to largest. You're thinking about using [quicksort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort), which involves recursively selecting a special "pivot" element and then partitioning the list into two sublists that are less than and greater than (or equal to) the pivot, respectively.
+
+Your teammate objects to the idea of moving elements based on whether they're greater or less than the pivot, which isn't obviously related to the ultimate goal of the list being sorted. "Why are you writing code that asymmetrically treats different numbers differently in a way not based on predicted outcomes?" he asks.
+
+"What would you suggest?" you ask, regretting the question almost as soon as you've finished saying it.
+
+"Well, we have a library that interacts with the [Manifold Markets API](https://docs.manifold.markets/api) ..."
````
from math import log2
temp = my_list[i]
my_list[i] = my_list[j]
my_list[j] = temp
-```
\ No newline at end of file
+```
+
+"No," you say.
+
+"What do you mean, No?"
+
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