To be fair if your benchmark is against demo day, at some point Amdahl's law kicks in regardless of how many multiples you have on engineering. Not sure if I believe the multiple of 10x or 100x anyway, but a better metric is “number of customer feedback loops” is a better metric than “can complete one (1) demo day in X time”. My (non YC) impression is that people are hitting more loops.
Also multiples “up” versus “down” are not symmetric. Airplanes are around 10x faster than cars, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be getting to work in 60 seconds.
As I understand it, fiduciary duty is a key requirement for insider trading to be considered illegal.
Insider trading law requires people with fiduciary duty to report trading, and largely allows any trading after earnings. In particular, with the view that all relevant information on the company was made public recently (if that's not the case, it's the company that would get in trouble). So insider trading is largely legal.
Also, the HK market being above the median by itself doesn't show that it's a good idea. Efficiency was defined as the relative spread in the paper. The efficiency of the HK market might be driven by other factors, like deeper adoption of technology. A better (but still not great) test would be what happened after HK made insider trading illegal.
Most of the negative examples are med/bio-related (including psychology here), whereas the single positive example is in CS/Engineering. Systematically med is dealing with a harder replication problem. Moreover, "light involvement from the academic system " is a significant stretch. Not all but most of the people doing the work have been trained within academia instead of within industry and the work has been from an academia-industry collaboration. Thinking about the proportion of people that go into academia vs industry makes the ratio more meaningful as well.
The replication crisis is clearly a big issue, but the conclusions I would draw from the examples presented are more difference between fields than a condemnation of academia. To just say "move it to private instituions" is shortsighted.
Also multiples “up” versus “down” are not symmetric. Airplanes are around 10x faster than cars, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be getting to work in 60 seconds.