I don't see an option to participate in this market? I'd like to buy Yes.

@ChrisGillett It's closed pending determining the resolution.

See my newer market with a better operationalization of the question you can trade on:

https://manifold.markets/jack/will-george-santoss-swearingin-be-d

(There might be a Manifold bug, I was trying to embed the market in the comments above and it didn't post)

Currently there are 2 votes for N/A (Conflux, Austin) and 1 vote for NO (Martin). If anyone wants to add a vote or change a vote, let me know. Thanks for all the comments so far.

We've reached the end of the voting time I set, so the decision by the resolution council is N/A. It is a split decision and not a completely clear consensus, but that's to be expected with cases like this, and I think it's a fair and reasonable outcome.

Also, if NO holders want, I'll gift you some mana to account for the profits you would have made if it resolved NO - contact me on Discord so I can send you the manalink.

If you have a trustworthy-ish badge or Manifold team member badge, discuss and vote by posting in the comments here, and if a consensus is reached by 11:00 pm ET Wed Jan 4 then I will resolve to that consensus. (Anyone else is welcome to participate in the discussion of course and say what you support, but your votes won't officially count.)

That's the short version, for the long version see here: /jack/will-this-resolution-council-propos

Motivation for this is that the earlier discussion below has revealed that there is in fact some disagreement on what the most correct resolution is, and I've always thought it would be a good idea to try to define best practices for how to delegate unclear resolutions to some sort of resolution council.

@jack I would not create this market. But if I did, I would resolve it NO. I place particular weight on "etc" in the market description. Also, you bet YES and a NO resolution avoids the appearance of a conflict of interest.

@MartinRandall Thanks for the comments.

I wouldn't worry about the conflict of interest part, I discussed this in a previous comment but I offered compensation to other traders if it makes sense, and also I could have and still could sell my YES shares (should I?). I didn't earlier because that would be a different type of conflict of interest! I was apparently the first person here to notice the profit opportunity but I knew there would be debate about the resolution.

Also, the entire point of this resolution council is to avoid any conflict of interest issues, so I'm hoping that it does form a consensus and I just resolve to that, preventing any concerns about it.

FWIW, I was probably more inclined to NO resolution initially after my research on the House proceeding, because I do generally prefer following the literal question, but after looking at a bunch of official sources, I believe in common parlance people talk about the new members of the House having already started their terms on Jan 3 regardless of the arcana of House proceedings (examples in my big comment)

One can also argue for YES based on spirit of the question being about Santos specifically, but for me that is probably just a secondary reason to prefer N/A, I typically prefer to primarily focus on understanding the meaning of the words in the question - and I think even that is unclear here.

@jack There are a few possible meanings of "begin serving his term", but since "if the House refuses to seat him" is NO, that limits what it could mean here. Even if that ends up being an unusual meaning.

Other interpretations are valid.

@MartinRandall Yep, I think that reasoning is valid, and it's one of two ways to interpret the constraint: you can assess or assume the question is (mostly) correct and figure out the meaning consistent with that. Or you could also assess that the question was written somewhat incorrectly (because I didn't know enough about the procedural details), and in such cases, if the incorrectness is important enough I usually go with n/a. I think both are reasonable viewpoints and it's tricky to choose the right one in different situations.

Question to determine how to best resolve:

Before this afternoon, did anyone else notice and trade on the fact that the en masse swearing-in might not take place today due to the unresolved Speaker election? The first obvious trades on this fact here occurred at 6pm ET, did anyone else anticipate and trade on this prior to that?

If you have any other thoughts or comments about resolution, please leave those as well. See my previous comment for the details.

Earlier today, I was doing some research on House procedures and discovered that first the Speaker is elected, and only after that are members are sworn in. See /jack/will-george-santoss-swearingin-be-d for a better version of this question and for more details about the procedures (and for a deep dive into procedural details, see https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL30725 and https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33780.html).

(I started trying to figure out how to resolve this market but I made the mistake of forgetting to close the market in the meantime.)

Here's my thinking so far:

I believe if we interpret the question text in light of a careful reading of the House procedures, this would imply a NO resolution, because I believe none of the Members (really, Members-Elect) of the House have officially started serving their terms yet (because they haven't taken the oath of office yet). See [1] below for details.

However, many official and highly reputable sources currently claim that the Members of the House (including Santos along with all the others) assumed office on Jan 3. See [2] below for details. So it seems to me that the common meaning of the words "begin serving his term" probably differ from the procedural meaning of the words.

Given that, I believe N/A resolution may be a better option. If in fact all market participants (along with myself as author) did not expect the literal-procedural meaning of the question until this afternoon, then this seems like the best resolution. Did anyone else notice and trade on the fact that the swearing-in might not take place today, before this afternoon?

[1] Procedural analysis

• I believe the official beginning of a member's term of service is upon taking the oath of office. Sources include

  • https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33780.html states "A Member-elect is not a Member of Congress, however, until he or she takes the oath of office and is seated by the House."

  • https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-HPRACTICE-108/html/GPO-HPRACTICE-108-35.htm "The Speaker's term of office begins on his taking of his oath of office, which immediately follows his election and opening remarks."

  • And for oaths of office in general, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_office says the oath is taken "before assuming the duties of an office".

• https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL33780.html states that one Member-elect may challenge the taking of the oath of office of another Member-elect, and that the question of the right to seat may then be determined by the House. Such challenges take place after the Speaker's election, according to https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL30725 section "Oath of Office for Members-Elect"

[2] Common meaning analysis

• Multiple sources, including highly reputable ones and ones that would typically be considered official, say that the members, including Santos and all the others, assumed office on Jan 3. https://www.house.gov/representatives, https://santos.house.gov/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos, https://ballotpedia.org/George_Devolder-Santos. They might be technically wrong in terms of the procedural language, but also this strongly suggests that the words have a common meaning that is different than the technical procedural meaning.

• Also, it seems to me that Members-Elect are serving in some official capacity because they are voting for the election of the Speaker. I don't think this is quite the same as saying they have started serving their terms, necessarily, but I think this is why it commonly makes sense to say that they assumed office already. For example, thinking of the 1856 fight for Speaker which took 2 months, I suspect most people would say that the members were "serving their terms" during those 2 months.

@jack Me being the largest NO holder by far and you being the largest YES holder by far, we definitely have biases, and maybe we should find someone neutral to resolve, or run a poll on Twitter or something?

My reasoning for this resolving NO is basically:

1.) If there was going to be a challenge to Santos due to him not being a citizen or something, there was no chance for it to happen yet.

2.) re: common meaning -- there are tweets and statements like https://twitter.com/pbump/status/1610402633222594561 which suggest that terms haven't started yet

@PeterWildeford I always try my best to get a consensus resolution. I do often run polls if there's disagreement, I will do that if there is disagreement and sufficient interest. And I asked in discord for opinions as well.

I'm not worried about myself being biased, it's a small amount of mana for me, but I would be happy to delegate the resolution to a resolution council of trusted authors (an idea that I've proposed previously as a general mechanism but that nobody has actually operationalized yet). FWIW, I noticed the technicality at around 2pm ET today (see https://manifold.markets/jack/will-george-santos-rny-be-sworn-in) and could have bought up all the NO myself here, but I avoided doing that to because I anticipated that the resolution would be unclear. (And that would have created a different profit bias, too). Normally I would have closed the market at that point (to avoid this situation where you bought a ton of NO and now have a vested interest in the resolution), but I simply forgot to.

@jack Cool. Yeah I trust you to do what is right here, even if that means resolving YES. I'd love the +1473M, but losing the 120M that I made a wild guess off of is no big deal.

1) Agreed, which is a reason this market clearly should not resolve YES. But N/A still can make sense

2) I view that tweet as simply another example of someone using the procedural meaning. I think it's pretty clear that terms haven't started yet in the sense of my research above under [1]. The question in my mind is what readers of the question could and should have understood.

@jack N/A resolution works with me, or happy to just see a poll or something show your "common meaning" theory is correct.

@PeterWildeford

@jack Cool. Yeah I trust you to do what is right here, even if that means resolving YES. I'd love the +1473M, but losing the 120M that I made a wild guess off of is no big deal.

This won't resolve YES, the only viable options are N/A (which cancels all trades on the markets and returns everyone their investments) or NO.

I also am generally willing to offer to pay people to compensate for the difference between the resolution they expected and the actual resolution, if there is a honest disagreement about the best resolution. In the case of N/A, that would be profits to the NO holders; or in the case of NO, that would be investments of the YES holders.

@jack I don't think this can reasonably resolve as no (he did vote for house speaker, which seems to me like a more fundamental characteristic of being in the house than a formal swearing in).

@ShakedKoplewitz Wait I had a bigger No position than I thought, nevermind.

Hmm. I will take into account the fact that you believed it couldn't resolve as NO earlier as evidence that other neutral or YES holders might hold that view. Unless that's not what you meant.

@jack tbh as much as my self-interest now incentivizes me to support settling this as "no", I did not consider this option causing it to resolve that way and feel like winning the bet for it wouldn't be in the spirit of the question, even if it does follow the exact letter.

(My vote is "wait to see if he has any issues after the speaker is sworn in, and resolve either no or n/a based on that).

@ShakedKoplewitz Thanks for your thoughts. This line of thinking is also what I anticipated in section [2] of my above comment, and is a major reason I think N/A may be the best resolution.

@jack I hold no position on this market, and would like to express my support for N/A for the reasons you outlined.

Well at the very least it shouldn't be settled n/a so long as there's a chance of it being settled no later (e.g. if his swearing in is delayed further after the speaker vote is done)

@ShakedKoplewitz Oh, that's actually a good point.

I'm not sure that makes sense - it probably makes sense from a spirit of the questoin perspective, but there's not a strong textual/literal basis for a NO resolution in the event that his swearing in is delayed later - plausibly you could argue for NO based on "if the House refuses to seat him" but if it's not happening on Jan 3 I don't see how to cleanly apply that.

@jack I vote "N/A".

(I think I take more of a contextualist vs literalist interpretation of resolutions, and would actually prefer YES to NO. So my overall preference looks something like N/A > YES >> NO)

The argument for waiting is that this is trying to measure whether Santos becomes a representative at the same time as the rest of the representatives, and so if the swearing-in is delayed, then the literal and contextual interpretations are in harmony. However, the fact that Santos is on the floor and voting for Speaker is powerful to me (he has begun serving!), and also the scenario I outlined is quite unlikely. I think I am still on team N/A.