The intrade markets are tiny and illiquid for real players. If I can get similar or better odds elsewhere on larger size, which I can, why would I use them?

The intrade market is purely reactive, not predictive. It has been for year and years. You can't have it both ways by saying they are going to be predictive, but when they are wildly wrong and switch overnight, then they are STILL predictive but taking into account new news.

Secondly, there are real transaction and contract costs involved. Plus the risk of not getting your money back and having to investigate the site, alone, with no help from the gov't if they stiff you.

If you think the tiny volume in that market is representative of ALL the collective wisdom as the NYSE is, or the Eurobond market, you're clearly mistaken.

the question I have to ask is "Will this drive more than 5% of my reading audience insane?"

If you have to ask that question, publish.

Spoken like a man who's never actually driven any of his readers insane.

I propose that general class of poke-the-taboo is a fourth, non useful direction, "modernarttopia". Suggestions should poke something the public isn't even aware is a taboo.

Well put. Although it's okay to have a scenario that violates something the public is aware as a taboo, as long as the violation is surprising and has a surprising fun-theoretical reason. It's mostly the obvious that traps you.

I should toss out my own. The first that occurs to me is that utopia could be far more constrained rather than far freer. Most of us seem to have a vision of a universe where you can do whatever you want so long as it harms no one else, a kind of Nozickian utopia of utopias. We will all move to Permutation City or build Prime Intellect, and then your only restraint is that you cannot restrain others.

If freedom is only instrumentally useful, rather than morally fundamental, there is no reason for this given sufficient powers of prediction and control. If Asimov's supercomputers really can get around the Hayekian knowledge problem and perfect the economy, most arguments against command economies just went out the window. If I really do know better than you, with no epistemic issues, giving you more freedom is like letting a child play in traffic. If I can prove to you with mathematical certainty that decision X would make things worse, and you still choose X (objectively and by your preferences), we have just proved that you are not capable of handling freedom.

Telling someone where the mines are takes all the fun out of Minesweeper, but you should do it IRL if the town is on the edge of an old war zone. If someone has the walkthrough for my life, I may not consult it constantly, but I would like a pop-up confirmation window to appear whenever a decision will lead to "game over." I would also like more save points.