Decided to resolve N/A, learned an annoying lesson about letting myself be swayed into changing the description mid-stream. Better to stick with an imperfectly initially worded market than make it ambiguous, and just open a second one that's more specific.

@LarsDoucet You did the right thing, that is all that matters. Have a great day!

@LarsDoucet

. Better to stick with an imperfectly initially worded market than make it ambiguous,

I think ambiguity is okay if upfront. Like if you worded it "Will I judge that [...]" then I think it becomes mostly okay no matter how you resolve this. Still, I feel that you did the right thing also, given your circumstances.

@LarsDoucet Well done.

@JoyVoid I don't think that using subjective qualifiers are a very good solution because that just normalizes ambiguity. I really like the way @jack handled the challenge I made to his market about whether or not Musk and Twitter would settle. He temporarily closed the market while we discussed the question I raised and others could also comment before any change was instituted.

@BTE I really feel like there's two part of manifold, one where ambiguity is welcome and explicit, and one for more grounded-in-objectivity question. Might be worth to have more tools to make this axis more specific and clear.

@LarsDoucet Thanks for making the market anyway and for (in my opinion) handling it very fairly.

Better to stick with an imperfectly initially worded market than make it ambiguous, and just open a second one that's more specific.

I don't think that's quite what happened here, from my perspective. The original question already wasn't clear to readers on whether an attempt to back out counted or not - from the original question, I believe Eigel and I interpreted it as roughly "will he attempt to back out" while dreev interpreted it as "will he succeed in backing out". So Eigel asked about it, and you answered them with a reasonable attempt to clarify the ambiguity - at least, that's how it looked from my perspective. The second ambiguity about what would count as Musk being forced to close added additional confusion on top of that but even just the first already makes it quite tricky to resolve the ambiguity given that I think many people had already traded on different interpretations.

I don't think there's always a good solution here. If the ambiguity is some edge case that isn't a big deal, or there's a clear reason to think one interpretation is better than the other, or if there hasn't been that much trading impact from the ambiguity, I'd typically edit it and depending on the circumstance may offer to reimburse anyone negatively impacted. And in other situations I'd often close N/A and reopening the market with a clarified description.

*Eigil

@v = NOT BOT

Pretty clear this should resolve NO.

Okay time to resolve this thing. Everybody who was arguing it should resolve N/A before, how do you feel today?

This is either going to resolve "NO" or, if you can convince me I messed it up with ambiguity, "N/A".

@LarsDoucet NO sounds right! I was arguing that there were possible worlds in which N/A would've been fairest but we didn't end up in those worlds.

Correction: We are in one of those possible worlds where some people might feel misled if it resolves NO, but I'm not one of those people. So I'll leave it to others to argue for YES or N/A. Again, I'm personally good with NO but if anyone feels misled then N/A may be fairer.

@dreev I'll leave this up for a bit and let someone who insists on an "N/A" resolution make their best case to convince me, otherwise I'll resolve "NO".

"successfully or not" is doing a lot of work here. I'd have thought this should have resolved "yes" due to the attempt to back out! by now, it seems clear it will resolve no.

From The Verge:

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It is not likely to pause its litigation, Talley says. It may want a settlement to include terms that enforce the deal — for instance, the entire purchase price going into an escrow account so that if Musk gets cold feet again, that account is simply emptied.

Both parties are likely to want a trial delay to close the deal, but it’s not clear how that may turn out, Talley says. “The lawsuit will not stop dead in its tracks. It will continue,” Talley says.

This may still resolve unambiguously.

What does everyone think about this new news:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-04/elon-musk-proposes-to-proceed-with-twitter-deal-at-54-20-a-share-twtr?cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

@LarsDoucet Looks like it's gonna resolve no.

I currently think this market should resolve N/A because there are too many ambiguities that weren't resolved. He sent a formal termination letter, and then changed his mind about it and is maybe going to buy Twitter after all. To me, that seems like he tried to back out of the deal and then realized that he couldn't.

"If the terms are renegotiated and he winds up buying it, it sill counts as "NO" because he did buy it." -> indicates it should resolve NO

"I will say that if he formally reneges on the deal, and it's very clear he has every intent to back out, and the only thing forcing him to go through is a court holding a gun to his head, then sure, this resolves as yes." -> not 100% match because the court case didn't go to trial yet, but pretty clear fit imo, which indicates it should resolve YES. (Note that the vast majority of cases are settled out of court, doesn't mean the court case wasn't holding a gun to their heads to force them into a settlement/plea deal)

You see, I think I disagree there, respectfully. I didn't word it as precisely as I should have, but when I meant a court was holding a gun to his head, I really mean they are forcing him to go into it, which essentially cashes out to a court order or losing at trial.

If he settles out of court, that means he's doing it of his own volition, even if he's really really not happy about it, because he could still go to trial and he chose not to. The spirit of this market the whole time was about whether Elon Musk would choose to not go through with the deal. If there's a court order forcing him, then clearly he didn't choose.

Just because buying Twitter is a less worse choice for him than facing up to whatever has yet to come out of discovery that he wants to remain hidden, doesn't mean he isn't choosing to agree to the deal.

I'm not about to pull the trigger on a ruling just yet tho.

I'll let y'all deliberate and/or push back on this and see what everyone thinks.

@LarsDoucet I should add that I don't hold my view strongly and I think there are other reasonable points of view, but I still lean towards N/A at the moment. I might be convinced otherwise.

@LarsDoucet If it's renegotiated AGAINST Musk (maybe Twitter requires stronger clauses to drop litigation), I don't see why would it should resolve to YES.

If there's a penny cut of the price, the I think it should be solved to NO.

Bloomberg suggests the first option.

@MP Do you have a typo in there? Both statements seem to be in favor or resolving to NO: "I don't see why would it should resolve to YES" --> did you mean "I don't see why it WOULDN'T resolve to YES" ?

@LarsDoucet Yes, I suspected I would mess with the double negatives.

If it's renegotiated AGAINST Musk (maybe Twitter requires stronger clauses to drop litigation), I think the market should settle at NO.

If there's a penny cut of the price, the I think it should be solved to YES.

Bloomberg suggests the first option.

@LarsDoucet if the spirit of the market is "about whether Elon Musk would choose to not go through with the deal", then it seems this market should resolve YES?
Elon clearly chose to back out of the deal, and it's looking like his back-outingness was unsuccessful.

@MathiasFoster I disagree, because from the very beginning at the top of the market was, "If the terms are renegotiated and he winds up buying it, it sill counts as "NO" because he did buy it."

IE, it's not about whether he wavered, or balked as a negotiating tactic. It's about whether he made a final decision. I introduced ambiguity by saying, "If a court literally forces him to, but otherwise he would have backed out it still resolves as if he backed out", but I think it's still clear that if we wake up one day in a world where Elon Musk owns twitter, and there was no court order or lost trial outcome forcing him to do it, then all his dancing around the issue up until that point ultimately cashed out to him not backing out of the deal.

Still going to keep the debate going, I want to be fair to everyone who put big bets down on this thing, gonna see if we can work out a consensus (and also need to leave some time for Elon the chaos monkey to make a few more moves).

@LarsDoucet I do think the possibility of this market resolving YES even if Musk (is forced to) buy twitter is a highly surprising to someone reading the title of this market, and that making the market resolution criteria ambiguous was not ideal. If he buys twitter, then he didn't back out, and the fact that he tried to back out seems immaterial.

You say the spirit of the market was about Elon's intent... and maybe that was your intent, but I'd guess that's not how a lot of people interpreted the market, despite the fine print at the top, and resolving on something as ambiguous Elon's intent, while there are much easier, non-ambiguous resolution criteria ("Will Elon buy twitter?", "Will Elon buy twitter at the terms of the original offer?", "Will a court order Elon to buy twitter?") - seems like a missed opportunity.

I think I would prefer a N/A resolution over resolving over a subjective interpretation of Elon's intent.

@Retsam19 Yeah I have some regrets. I think I'll hold tighter to original resolution criteria in the future.

That said I think there's still a good chance of this resolving unambiguously, or at least unambiguously enough. If he goes ahead and just buys it, and there was no court order forcing him to, that seems fairly clear cut to me personally?

@LarsDoucet

If he settles out of court, that means he's doing it of his own volition, even if he's really really not happy about it, because he could still go to trial and he chose not to. The spirit of this market the whole time was about whether Elon Musk would choose to not go through with the deal. If there's a court order forcing him, then clearly he didn't choose.

I don't really agree with this framing. If someone takes a plea deal in a criminal case and goes to jail, are they "making a choice" or are they "forced" to go to jail? That's not an exact analogy of course, but more similar is if someone takes a plea deal and pays a fine.

Another way to look at it: let's suppose hypothetically that Elon Musk and everyone else knew that the court would order specific performance. Then I think it wouldn't make sense to say that Elon made the choice of his own volition - no matter what he had done he would have ended up having to close the deal. And I don't think this hypothetical scenario is all that different than the actual scenario.

@jack I think the analogy doesn't quite hold because the typical defendant in a criminal case facing jailtime, typically supported by a public defender, is really pretty different from Elon Musk, the off-and-on-again richest man in the world, in a civil trial, not facing jail time, is not really comparable. He could go to trial if he wanted to.

Yeah, sure, it's not a very analogous situation. Nevertheless, my take on the situation is that M&A law forced Musk to close the deal. The law only very rarely is enforced through court order - most of the time people follow the law and just the anticipated threat of enforcement action is enough.

just the anticipated threat of enforcement action is enough.

Are you sure? The Biden administration is currently facing a string of defeats when it comes to court battles over M&A related regulations:

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-antitrust-idINL1N30Z15M

So I'm not sure it's clear cut that anything was "forced" here or there was an inevitable outcome, even if we accept your framing.

Still open to being convinced, of course.

Ok, my claim about that might have been too strong. But my main concern isn't so much about the specifics of that clause, as about the broader question of whether Musk tried to back out of the deal.

Musk did formally send a termination letter. It might have been his intent to back out, or it might have been purely a negotiation tactic, but I think if the question had just been "Did Musk attempt to back out of the deal?" with no further clarifications, then the answer would be a clear yes. Since there are some clarifications that are somewhat contradictory, it seems pretty ambiguous to me.

Anyway, I already thought N/A resolution would make the most sense based on the previous conversation https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-elon-musk-back-out-of-the-deal#uucU4LWG7m1YvBPehUfi, now I think it also makes sense for a different reason. But I think I've said my piece, I want to hear what others think too.

@jack This I think is the most persuasive of your arguments. A formal termination letter is a big, pretty clear move, and then it's down to whether the title or the text body, or the clarifications therein move the needle. (I think there's a pretty clear reading of the text & clarifications, but there's a case to be made it's ambiguous). I'll let some more people weigh in before I decide.

@LarsDoucet (There's also the salient fact that I have a lot of fake money riding on "NO" that I think may weigh just as heavily as any other criteria in resolving this). I think despite the case I've been consistently arguing for above, I feel myself tipping towards N/A and just learning some lessons on how to craft a good market in the future.

But please continue to debate the point while we keep following the news.

@LarsDoucet I'm with @jack but my biggest argument for N/A is that I think the thing being predicted wasn't just clarified but changed. It started as "Will Musk manage to back out?" and became "Will Musk's actions constitute a genuine attempt to back out?".

If I'm wrong and the second version was the right interpretation all along then I'd probably argue that an intermediate resolution would be fair, like saying it's 60% true that he attempted to back out or something. How to settle on a number like 60% I don't know. Unless he doesn't actually end up buying Twitter, then 0% aka NO is the only answer and it should resolve to that.

In short, let's see what happens, see how people think it should resolve according to how they interpreted the question, and if there are strong cases for different resolutions then resolve N/A. Otherwise resolve to the consensus.

PS: To clarify, it's not just strong cases for different resolutions that would justify an N/A resolution. If there's an ambiguous question and there's an equally strong case for resolving YES and for resolving NO, I think resolving to 50% is best. The answer to whether X would happen is that it 50% happened. That's a fine resolution capturing the inherent ambiguity.

But if there are strong cases for different interpretations of what the question actually asked AND reality plays out such that those different interpretations matter, then the only fair resolution is N/A.

Like if we ask "does 10 + 10 = 100?" and if, hypothetically, there's some reasonable reason that some people thought the numbers were in binary then resolve N/A. If we ask "does 10 + 1 = 11?" then the binary/decimal ambiguity doesn't matter and it can resolve YES. If we ask "is 100 a big number?" then it may be infuriatingly hard to pick a fair answer but the ambiguity is on the table from the start and it's ok to resolve it as fairly as we can. Unless the binary vs decimal thing matters materially in deciding how true it is that "100" is "big".

PPS: I think I'm overcomplicating it. It's just that one should resolve N/A if there's no other way to resolve without credible claims to being misled. If Musk buys Twitter but this resolves YES because he tried to back out, I would claim I was misled because I bought NO before the addendum was added. If it resolves NO then I have no complaint, but others might.