Summary: attempts to resolve No if we are surprised by a major event (before 2025-11-01 UTC) AND no market resolves in response, Yes otherwise.

Clearly, sometimes Something Happens. But nonetheless, we expect that things Don't Happen with some regularity.

But there are problems with reports that say that something hasn't happened. In addition to the known knowns and the known unknowns, there are also unknown unknowns. How will we establish that Something Happened if we didn't anticipate it in advance?

Well, sometimes there is great interest after the Thing that Happened. Perhaps we can use that to gauge the answer, if only in retrospect?

This market will attempt to gauge the Rumsfeldian risks, the Knightian uncertainty, that Something might Happen that we had not foreseen. Now obviously this is a far harder challenge than merely determining whether Something Happened that we had anticipated. So, some rules:

Unanticipated: If it causes a market to resolve, and that market existed before the event, clearly someone had Anticipated it - at least in vague terms. If you'd known it was coming, you could have placed your bet, and now you could say I Told You So. The same is true for events that unambiguously increment a counter towards a total count of similar events for which a market exists. But sometimes we can guess the shape of the thing without guessing the details.

Something: Clearly it must be a thing people care about; but how to measure that? When the Thing is Anticipated, there's a popular market. But sometimes the interest follows the event. We'll count it as Something if there is a market that is clearly created in response to the Thing, that has total traders within a factor of two of the top 50 (ranked, not stonks), within 30 days of creation. Markets after the fact are less interesting, after all, so a somewhat lower bar is appropriate.

Happened: As per the linked markets. It'll be a judgment call. I won't trade in this market. Hopefully this one will be mostly-obvious; why create an ex post facto market about the status quo, and why would it trade heavily?

In keeping with the inspiration markets, this will resolve Yes in the boring case, and No in the exciting case.

Previously: /EvanDaniel/will-nothing-unanticipated-happen-b

• Update 2025-09-12 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Unanticipated

  • Pre-existing markets that resolve due to the event, even if only indirectly related (e.g., "Will [person] do X this year?" resolving because they died), count as Anticipated.

  • In multiple-choice markets, if an answer becomes impossible due to the event and effectively drops to 0% (even if the market cannot resolve yet), that also counts as Anticipated—treated similarly to "unambiguously incrementing a counter."

  • There is a limit to how loosely related the pre-existing market can be; the above examples meet the bar. Broad effects like "the stock price moved" are not specific enough.