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I resolved partial resolutions for countries being actively, continuously bombed but where the "meaning" or military commitments of this are ambiguous. Salami tactics and border skirmishes are definitionally fractional, and both resolutions are fractional in favor of not being wars, though I didn't have anything more than a general heuristic for this. Feel free to offer feedback and I will try to be more legible and rigorous in the future.

@JessicaEvans How is Venezuela so low, & "no war" marked "YES?" We're seizing their tankers & now attacking them, on Venezuelan soil, with drones. Goals have been stated. This would seem to meet your very hazy criteria.

What on Earth are you counting as "war?"

@ChurlishGambit The English word "no" is not equivalent to the logical operation of negation. This just isn't how natural language works. And that's extremely annoying, but also, a true annoying thing is worth more than a fake comforting thing.

I've said before that I don't understand the actions in Venezuela to have a real military objective. They seem almost like Clockwork Orange violence as sport using military resources and not like military action. It has many features of war and I also do not like those features in general or in this specific case, but I don't want to call it "fully" a war, or even mostly a war. It can be a little bit a war. And obviously not in a metaphorical sense, but in a real one. That's just my position. You can move the percent assessment but not the way I do assessment.

@JessicaEvans The objectives are seizure of oil, reduction in drug trafficking, and primarily, the end of Maduro's government. How are those not "real military objectives?"

@ChurlishGambit You're allowed to not like my understanding of the world. But in this case, no, they're not.

Basic impression is, this is theater. Heuristics are complicated and hard to explain. In Iraq, the oil did not cover the sticker price. Stealing Venezuelan oil probably wouldnt justify the sticker price either. Trump doesn't actually have a root commitment to war either, he has a root commitment to performance but also happens to be a very good performer. This just isn't a real thing. People are still dying, things are still being destroyed including relationships, but this doesn't go down to the roots that a war comes from, so it won't go up to the skies of what a war is.

@JessicaEvans I don't understand why this is even a market if it depends entirely on your opinion. You said the boat murders didn't count due to a lack of objectives, but now you say the objectives don't count either. You say you will use "common sense," but you're not using that at all, you're using very personal definitions. This market doesn't predict in any useful way.

@ChurlishGambit I mean, I'd like to see more steps in your reasoning to understand your own intuition. Most people seem happy with my resolution.

@JessicaEvans Common sense is kind of a malformed idea anyway, mostly in practice it means "my most robust, simple ideas, from a preconsidered state I don't have metacognitive understanding of, but that I respect because they represent the most violence from the universe in respect to selection pressure on cognition, and because most of my most functional complex ideas are downstream of it"

@JessicaEvans Not war, goals fake https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/03/trump-us-operation-captured-venezuela-president-nicolas-maduro.html

@ChurlishGambit OK, but that happened after the market closed. It is also a weirdly eccentric way of prosecuting a war. But it is a pretty obvious provocation that could cause a war too. I'm very sorry if you thought the point of these prediction markets was to be an authoritative source of reason. It's more like it's a way for me to entangle myself in the collective process of improving reason, something which I unfortunately benefit from more than others quite frequently, and do so even when that is not the default understanding of these relationships. So explicitly, that's what this is. I am a living violation of the confucian principle of not associating with your inferiors, a primal terror clawing it's way up from hell and inserting myself, unwanted, into rationalist spaces. And I am doing this first for my own improvement. But I do intend to start making good as soon as possible.

@JessicaEvans It happened after the market closed, but don't you see that this was a war? It's like saying someone who planned a murder, wasn't really planning it, even if they committed the murder. It's nonsensical.

"I am a living violation of the confucian principle of not associating with your inferiors"

c'mon man

@ChurlishGambit It is retroactively nonsensical. It seems epistemically bad to treat every threat with absolute seriousness. But obviously, this threat needed more seriousness than I was willing to give it. I need you to explain what heuristics I should be applying here that I am presently not. I know they are common sense to you. They are not to me. I need them spelled out.

@JessicaEvans It isn't "retroactively" nonsensical, your whole approach to this was nonsensical. You made every effort to establish exceptions to "what is war."

Even now, you're just calling it a "threat." But people were killed. That's not just a threat. The President, who is in charge of killing, said this was his goal. And you told me, the goals weren't serious, don't count, because...you didn't feel like it, I guess? Months of military action, somehow, weren't "war" to you.

You established rules—like not needing a formal declaration of war—but then said that essentially anything short of a formal declaration of war, didn't count as war.

You said:
"f it were a real war, there would be real objectives. Fishing boats are not a real objective, therefore it is not a real war."

Firstly, how are you determining what is a "real objective?" You have some special definition that's never been stated, that I don't think is rational in any sense.

But even then, the objective was never "fishing boats." The President has been saying, clearly, loudly, repeatedly, that his goal was killing or unseating Maduro. How is that not a "real objective?" What is a "real objective" for you?

@ChurlishGambit Alright, yes, I'm starting to understand. I guess what I mean is, the purpose of war is usually to conquer an enemy, sometimes to weaken an enemy to bring them to the negotiating table, sometimes to weaken an enemy even though you don't expect them to negotiate or maybe even want to negotiate. Bombing fishing boats seemed like an action that could only accomplish some secret fourth purpose. Since I don't have any guess as to what that purpose is, my initial impression is that it is not an act of war, because I don't know what that purpose has in common with the other purposes. But yes, fundamentally I guess this was just a reification of my ignorance, which is a root level violation of good epistemics. However, I don't know that interpreting every act of violence as war related is better. If you are willing to make the case for that, or for there being better frameworks for sorting this out, or for some other missing link in my reasoning, please do that. I understand the core error I made. You are correct. I still do not know how to better avoid error in these assessments.

@JessicaEvans

"Bombing fishing boats seemed like an action that could only accomplish some secret fourth purpose."

What about seizing oil tankers? Launching missiles against Venezuelan soil?

"Since I don't have any guess as to what that purpose is,"

You don't have to guess. The President stated the objectives over & over & over, for months.

"However, I don't know that interpreting every act of violence as war related is better."

Why not? What is the utility of considering war something narrow & special?

", or for some other missing link in my reasoning,"

Well again the main missing link is, saying that the stated war objectives weren't "real objectives." The person in charge of the military stated objectives, but you decided they weren't real, which is totally nonsensical.

@ChurlishGambit Seizing oil tankers would be piracy if done by a non nation state actor. But looting can be a war objective. It is just weird to think about in the context of a superpower known for shock and awe tactics in the year 2025. They are acting like steppe nomads with Raytheon tech. That is a weird combination and my mind lacks readiness for it.

The president is constantly saying nonsense with equal willfulness to real things. Discerning his real threats from his fake ones is complicated. In practice this seems to be mostly camouflage for people below him to prosecute things according to their own hidden logic. I have almost no insight into this. But yes, it is more reasonable to realize there is malice somewhere in this cluster than to write off the threat due to confusion. That is being duped. I'm sorry.

The utility is, not risking a disproportionate response. Not risking normalizing disproportionate responses. Not wasting mental effort on a tactic which is primarily designed to waste mental effort, for the sake of degrees of harm that seem comparatively much more limited than even the wars of 10 years ago. Those things are important to me. The problems you care about are real, there is a sense in which my analysis consists of writing them off rather than actually doing analysis, but also, I just don't see a way for me to make forward progress on clarifying heuristics here. I'm sorry.

@JessicaEvans

He killed people. How does that not make a threat serious? If someone threatened to kill your friend, and did, would you say it was "just a threat?"

What greater crime is there than murder? How is it possible to disproportionately respond to killing?

When you excuse & minimize killing, as you have done, all you do is normalize murder. You have put a numerical value on human life—& it seems you don't value it much at all.

@ChurlishGambit All violence is an implicit valuation of human life. I will always choose an answer to violence that normalizes a higher valuation of it that it currently has. I don't know that I can, in strategically sound terms, always say it is infinitely valuable, without then totally destroying my ability to respond to people committing more violence, with robust commitments to more violence. Again, you are welcome to just tell me how to do this, and I will do it. You seem to prefer whining. I know violence is bad. I didn't make the world.

@JessicaEvans First you call me inferior, now you say I'm just whining. Why would I continue this conversation?

@ChurlishGambit I called myself inferior

at other markets venezuela is 22-30%

@questionyourself This is my market, so it is especially unlikely to happen, even if that violates ontological parsimony

@JessicaEvans any strikes in Venezuela are not counting as the war?

@questionyourself I think my personal resolution criteria closely match general consensus. I was just being teasing or self deprecating. Apologies.

USA counts??

@AlvaLindqvist I think even being heterodox in definitions, that would be occupation and not war. If you can make the case for those not being fully mutually exclusive categories, both in general and in this specific case, I will absolutely consider that. I think that would give me an opportunity to define the furthest extreme at which my own categorization scheme ceases to reject consensus

@JessicaEvans deploying troops, occupation, acts of violence against local militia groups?