Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself.
-- C. S. Lewis
The market isn't particularly efficient. For example, if you bought "No" on all the presidential candidates to win, it would cost $16.16, but would be worth at least $17 for a 5% gain. Of course, after paying the 10% fee on profits and 5% withdrawal fee you would be left with a loss, which is why this opportunity still exists.
Does this affect the accuracy of the market? Serious question; I do not understand the nitty-gritty economics very well.
Just as a little bit of a counterpoint, I loved the 2006-2010 ebook and was never particularly bothered by the length. I read the whole thing at least twice through, I think, and have occasionally used it to look up posts and so on. The format just worked really well for me. This may be because I am an unusually fast reader, or because I was young and had nothing else to do. But it certainly isn't totally useless :P
Working from memory, I believe that when asked about AI in the story, Eliezer said "they say a crackpot is someone who won't change his mind and won't change the subject -- I endeavor to at least change the subject." Obviously this is non-binding, but it still seems odd to me that he would go ahead and do the whole thing that he did with the mirror.
I mean, you could run correlations with Openness to experience or with age, right? I guess there's probably too small of a sample size to do a lot of interesting analysis with it, but I'm sure one could do some.