> The question is not whether the market picks the optimal outcome, but whether a committee of experts would do better. The experience of central planning within the Warsaw Pact should hint at the answer...

The experience of the entire Internet seems to suggest a different answer, so it's not that central planning is always bad. Note that the best, most reliable, most stable parts of the Internet were invented and codified long ago, when there weren't many people on-line and there wasn't that much commercial interest in it. Today we can rarely if ever agree on any kind of protocol or standard, and if we do, it's usually a huge bloated mess.

> Today we can rarely if ever agree on any kind of protocol or standard, and if we do, it's usually a huge bloated mess.

So the question becomes, how do you know whether you're going to get a huge bloated mess or the Internet, and how do you influence the outcome?

As the number of potential 'experts' increases and the number of people involved in choosing them increases, you get something that looks more and more like a market, but without price transparency...

Randomly chosen from a democratically determined set, e.g. by a double-blind peer review committee.

Also, the facts can be discussed openly and if there was a problem with some of them, there could be a system of revoking or modifying the set of questions similar to the recounting of ballots.

For the committee of experts, that was your idea, I never suggested that, because it obviously makes no sense.