I'm not making any kind of statement as to whether or not these prediction markets should exist - but one thing that irritates me is a fundamental error people

I'm not making any kind of statement as to whether or not these prediction markets should exist - but one thing that irritates me is a fundamental error people make when evaluating them. It seems like people conflate "25% of the money is on a yes outcome for xyz event" with "xyz event yes outcome is 25% likely." It isn't. It's merely a measure of people's confidence in the event's outcome, and even if in aggregate people are 99.9% confident of something, they can be wrong (and often are). Yet often, when I get into debates about the likelihood of some event, people will often point to these markets as a refutation of the argument or in support of theirs. It probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does, because there's a lot of money to be made from delusion .