It may be useful for finding ideas to earn money, but I have seen no indications that crowd sourcing is at all useful for solving complex questions, designing complex machinery, or discovering any form of truth.

Missed the whole protein folding thing, did you?

That's the exception that proves the rule.

Also, the crowd sourcing aspect of the whole protein folding thing merely involved doing the grunt work, of which there was so much the scientists that set up the parameters for it couldn't possibly do it all themselves. The true achievement was thinking up the parameters for the thousands of monkeys to twiddle, not the twiddling itself.

This strikes me as a "no true Scotsman" argument.

Never heard of that before. But yeah, after looking it up on Wikipedia, you're right.

So let me correct it - it's not the exception that proves the rule, it's yet another example of crowd sourcing contributing little of true significance.