Right, but that doesn't do anything unless there's life-savings-amounts of money on the line such that anyone is incentivized to actually try. And even when people are incentivized, just look at the stock market for clear evidence that it doesn't work: a market doesn't magically make people good at things; people screw up and lose bets and go bankrupt all the time. Sure some of the decently-competent banks and hedge funds don't---but there is no reason to think there are any actors close to that sophisticated on a prediction market.

You're of course that it's not yet as sophisticated as the stock exchange, but I wouldn't be as dismissive of the importance people attach to internet points.

The problem isn't that they don't place importance in them. It's that there is nothing weeding out failure. Financial incentives in principle (although definitely not very well in practice lol) punish failure in a resilient way: you actually can't keep betting if you can't win. Where... I don't think that's true for prediction markets?

Anyway, I dunno. I also don't believe that people predict well even with incentives, and think the whole thing is a farce, so I'm just a pretty dogged skeptic.