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Apr 18
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Today (17/10) a hospital in Gaza was bombed, causing the death of at least 500 people. Hamas blames Israel and Israel blames a misfire of the Islamic Jihad.

This market will resolve 6 months according to a review of international media sources. I will be the arbiter, so I will not be betting on this market, but I am welcoming discussion and I will make an effort to make a resolution that is as broadly aggreable as possible.

This market will resolve to one of 5 options

YES - If there is a consensus that Israel did it.

75% - If there is significantly more evidence that Israel did it than that they didn't.

50% - If there is still no available independently verifiable evidence (unverified claims from Israel or Hamas don't count) or no clarity as to who did it.

25% - If there is significantly more evidence that it is not Israel who did it.

NO - If there is a consensus that it is not Israel who did it.

Resolving YES or NO would also require a consensus of Manifolders, but I am intentionally leaving what this means up to interpretation. This is done in order to avoid controversial resolutions, but the more important consensus required for YES or NO is that of experts.

Full disclosure - I am Israeli, but I don't support many of my government's actions, so I don't think I'm really biased here. I will do my best to keep an open mind, discuss with the community, and stick to facts.

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Resolution please @Shump. Or initiation of consensus-seeking process, if that's what you're going for.

@Accuracy These people literally call the IDF the IOF. Ignore them.

bought Ṁ400 of NO

Wikipedia finally comes around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosion

The consensus from various independent studies of videos, images, and eyewitness reports of the explosion, its aftermath, and the blast area suggests that an errant rocket launch from within Gaza is the most probable cause. While this is not a conclusive finding, it is currently considered the likeliest explanation based on the evidence gathered in investigations conducted by the Associated Press, CNN, The Economist, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal.[7] Human Rights Watch stated that the available evidence made an Israeli airstrike "highly unlikely".[6]

@chrisjbillington English Wikipedia did, Arabic Wikipedia is still very confident this was a massacre through Israeli airstrike on the hospital :/

bought Ṁ50 of YES

Buying a big of yes due to creator uncertainty

@MarcusAbramovitch I think @Shump is pro-Israel and voted that the IDF is generally trustworthy. Probably not a good buy.

@nathanwei If you look at more of my comments you'll find a much more mixed picture. I voted YES only because I kind of hated the concept of that market and I thought that the result should be more % trustworthy but the way it's constructed biased it against the IDF.

Please don't turn this into a market about predicting my own beliefs. I sincerely will try my best to resolve this based on the overall media picture, not on my own priors.

@Shump Sure. Let me revise that and say "Shump does not have an unfair bias against Israel and can be trusted to not resolve this as yes just because he/she hates Israel".

bought Ṁ400 of NO

New NYT article, "Revisiting the Gaza Hospital Explosion"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/briefing/gaza-hospital-explosion.html

predicts YES

lol

@Joshua No I actually think this is a rare NYT win. This article is a clear overview, doesn't repeat the bullshit from the previous NYT article that their investigation somehow destroyed the IDF's case, and ends with a good conclusion.

He's right that both sides deserve scrutiny, and both sides do lie. Although you're right that the lies are not exactly balanced.

This reinforces my belief that something is wrong specifically with the NYT editors, not the writers.Threy are the ones who seem to be pushing an agenda.

Edit: Don't read too much into this comment please. This is not a strong belief, there is a lot of time remaining until resolution, and I will do much more serious work to determine this then. This is written to improve transparency into my thought process and how I might go about resolving.

Update: If I was to resolve this today, this would probably resolve to 25%. This is in line with the description of the event on Wikipedia, which is generally a goal that I want to meet in the resolution.

Currently, the picture of the evidence I see is:

  • Multiple Western Intelligence agencies concluded that it probably wasn't Israel

  • Multiple major newspaper investigations also support the view of a Palestinian misfire

  • OSINT analysts and the NYT imvestigation have cast doubt that the exploding rocket in the sky is Palestinian, so there appears to be no link between the two explosions.

  • Some other pieces of evidence, like the audio clip released by the IDF speaker, have also been cast into doubt

  • However, the ballistics seem to support a Palestinian misfire. The small explosion crater, the fact that Hamas said that the rocket "vaporized" and other evidence seems way more compatible with the Palestinian misfire interpretation than anything else

  • However, a lot of uncertainty remains and it's hard to get much evidence as long as no investigator can actually access the strike.

predicts NO

@Shump multiple western intelligence agencies have done independent investigations and concluded it wasn't israel.

On the other hand, biased media outlets jumped on a claim by a motivated terrorist group and don't want to retract and admit they were duped and said terrorist organization doesn't allow for more investigation to be done.

Not sure how this picture isn't consensus among anyone who could possibly be trying to find the truth

bought Ṁ0 of YES

For the record I agree with Marcus, despite buying yes.

predicts NO

I literally can't think of a single reason why Hamas wouldn't produce the weapon for international investigators and would bizarrely claim that it dissolved unless it wasn't an Israeli munition.

Don't bet too much on this update please. There's still plenty of time until resolution and I intend to do a much more serious evaluation in the end.

The main reason I'm saying 25% is not because I disagree on the evidence, but because it seems to me like a lot of people are still not convinced. And no, I don't think they are all so biased as to disregard them. Intelligence assessments are valuable, but because they rely on non-public information they can't be verified.

I literally can't think of a single reason why Hamas wouldn't produce the weapon for international investigators

I agree that it's probably because they're lying, but it can also be due to mistrust of international investigators. Hamas might not be letting anyone nearby because perhaps they're hiding some stuff in that hospital too. Remember that when Shireen Abu Akleh was killed, the Palestinian Authority didn't want to hand over the bullet either, even when they were right.

bought Ṁ0 of YES

I can sympathize as the person running the wikipedia-based version of the market.

You said that being in line with wikipedia is generally in line with how you want your resolution to be here, could you elaborate on that? Do you think you have a higher or lower standard of evidence than wikipedia, or almost exactly the same?

@Joshua I generally think (English) Wikipedia does a great job of summarizing evidence, I guess a similar level of evidence? I just checked two controversial events that I think did reach a consensus, Shireen's death and the Kakhova dam explosion. The first is shown as conclusive, and the Kakhova Dam has this quote in the start:

Many experts have concluded that Russian forces likely blew up a segment of the dam to hinder the planned Ukrainian counter-offensive. Russian authorities have denied the accusation.

I'm not sure that counts as consensus but I it seems compatible enough with my view of the events.

Checking Wikipedia again, it does seem to indicate a consensus has been reached. So perhaps if I had to resolve today I would resolve NO? Anyways, I don't want to extend this discussion too much. I posted this because I wanted to give traders more transparency in how I'm thinking about resolving this, not because I have a strong opinion at the moment.

Just checked the Nordstream Sabotage wiki page and I'm updating against blindly trusting Wikipedia. Page still shows the perpetrator as totally unknown, despite there being significantly more evidence for Ukrainian involvement, which is also apparent from reading the full article. Maybe the lesson is to not trust the summary at the top of the article but to try to summarize it independently.

predicts NO

@Shump I would say there is much more evidence in this case than for Nordstream.

@SemioticRivalry Agreed. Nordstream is a clear 75% Ukraine to me, while this one is probably in between the 25% and NO options, which is why I'm getting pushback for what I said.

predicts NO

@Shump I have similar feelings after looking at the UAW strike page. A random user made very important changes w/no discussion; after I commented about it, another random user partially reverted them. There doesn't seem to be much actual discussion about it, things just happen and they wait for it to get fixed months or later

@Ernie The thing about Wikipedia is that its reliability scales with the attention that the page gets. I'm not sure the UAW strike page gets enough attention to become reliable.

@Shump I’m trying to find literally any explanation for why Hamas hasn’t produced fragments from a different Israeli artillery shell as from that site unless they’re trying to be honest.

It’s not like there’s a dearth of Israeli artillery shell fragments in the immediate vicinity of the hospital.

predicts NO

@DanPowell maybe because they know that a forensic investigation would go against them. If they are so honest why are they saying the missile dissolved which is physically impossible?

bought Ṁ2 of YES

@SemioticRivalry My first thought is that it’s a translation error, like the casualty number that was mistranslated as a fatality number.

I can’t find the original statement and I wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was correctly translated.

But if you’re so confident that forensics investigations can tell exactly when and where a shell hit from pictures of the fragments, then Israel should be encouraging the collection of fragments from the shells that are alleged to have targeted the evacuation routes during the peak of the evacuation.

predicts NO

@DanPowell it was quoted extensively in the New York times, I seriously doubt they mistranslated it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/22/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-hospital-evidence.html

@DanPowell Confusion between "dissolved" and "melted"?

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