They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a real and highly accurate piece of information. It's quite difficult and expensive to produce information as fast and reliable by other means. And they don't cost much, it's mostly money being moved around.
edit: I interpreted it as asking wether prediction markets in general produce value. In this specific case I'm 100% with you, they're absolutely useless in predicting wether this finding is going to replicate or not.
BTW probably 100% useless is going to be better than trusting a single reply in a HN thread. Even averaging out a group of replies on HN is going to be pretty bad, probably worse than averaging out a group of replies on Reddit.
The idea of wisdom of the crowd is based on the idea that knowledge about a topic (both false and true) is roughly normally distributed (as many things are in nature), so the averaged result of a large group of answers is likely to be close to the real answer, as long as there are no external factors pushing the whole distribution left or right.
Also, the final result is not going to be the answer if it's gonna replicate, but more the odds of it replicating (i.e. the odds of a paper like this being legit). The odds could be 1 in a million, and it still wouldn't affect the reality of LK-99 being super conductive or not.
edit: I interpreted it as asking wether prediction markets in general produce value. In this specific case I'm 100% with you, they're absolutely useless in predicting wether this finding is going to replicate or not.
BTW probably 100% useless is going to be better than trusting a single reply in a HN thread. Even averaging out a group of replies on HN is going to be pretty bad, probably worse than averaging out a group of replies on Reddit.
The idea of wisdom of the crowd is based on the idea that knowledge about a topic (both false and true) is roughly normally distributed (as many things are in nature), so the averaged result of a large group of answers is likely to be close to the real answer, as long as there are no external factors pushing the whole distribution left or right.
Also, the final result is not going to be the answer if it's gonna replicate, but more the odds of it replicating (i.e. the odds of a paper like this being legit). The odds could be 1 in a million, and it still wouldn't affect the reality of LK-99 being super conductive or not.