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I respect the thrust of this argument in general, but Nate Silver specifically came the closest to predicting Trump's victory out of the major pollsters. Most pollsters just look at the headline probabilities but fail to properly take conditional probabilities into account. They looked at poll after poll and did the fairly standard "average everything, find the STDEV, there's your confidence interval, 99% clinton victory." What made Nate Silver special is that his model accurately identified the sorts of universes in which trump was likely to win by finding out the ways in which various poll results and errors were correlated. That allowed him to more accurately assess the possibility of a systematic underpolling based off of purely statistical guesswork-- he didn't need to understand why the polls could have been (and ultimately were) biased for clinton, he just had to set up his model so it spit out that possibility on its own.
Based on the reality we live in, it's probably true that even Nate's estimate was wrong-- that it wasn't rolling a 5+ on the six-sided election day dice that gave trump the win, but that underlying factors put trump's win probability somewhere north of 50%. Given the data available though, Nate was the most effective poll-aggregator available.
Prediction markets are like a super-nate. Aside from each individual user having having access to all the same tools nate did (and the retrospective + incentive to use them), every vote on every market is a sort of poll, and all the people playing arbitrage force the markets to take into account conditional probabilities. They're still not going to be "right," all the time-- they're not even necessarily going to outperform your average pundit. But as a casual observer without inside knowledge, following the markets is a dominant strategy over basing your worldview on any particular pundit or basket of pundits. It's like the "always buy SPY" investment advice. Rare people, in rare cases, can consistently outperform the betting markets. But without some very convincing reasons, you shouldn't assume you're one of them.
I don’t disagree with you, my objection is really primarily aesthetic and partially on principle. A fund manager makes a bet, he doesn’t just decide that there’s a 70% chance of Boeing stock doubling in the next year, he gambles that it will. This counts as ‘making a decision’.
Nate is the actually worse than the bank research analyst who defends his buy rating on a stock that took a huge dive by saying that all he actually meant was that it would most likely do well, and then shrugs, because at least the latter has a position.
Nate should be confident enough, at least, to have a headline prediction that says “X is probably going to win”.
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