I’m resolving this N/A, here’s a quick TL;DR on this whole thread and why this is resolving this way:

• In November, I made this market assuming it would be about the next aid package, as there was beginning to be talk from the left about voting to condition aid.

• In February, Biden released a memo directing his Sec. of State and Defense to build a path to removing any foreign aid if laws were being broken. We had a whole debate about the “any conditionality whatsoever” portion of the description.

• Yesterday, people raised the point that the title and description use the prepositions “in” and “on” and Biden’s memo isn’t in the aid bill. I agree with this interpretation of the market, which means that I misinterpreted and misled better for a good month on how it would Resolve. If I had written a strong description, it would’ve noted that the text must be in the bill already (and my more recent markets are much more concrete from making these mistakes along the way).

• It’s not fair for people to lose mana because of ambiguity in my market, which I accentuated by misreading it further. I’m Resolving this N/A and you’ll all get your mana back, and I’ll lose the ~160 trader and partner bonuses. I’m sorry if this wasn’t the outcome that you were hoping for. It’s the fairest in my eyes, and I completely understand the low reviews.

@mattyb thanks for the update Matt and while people will always have an opinion regardless of outcome, I think this was the best of the available options given some conflicting (and both justified imo!) perspectives. just one of those classic annoying outlier scenarios where the comments weeks ago were adequate based on the information and process available, and in practice, things looked a bit differently. there's no accounting for every possibility unfortunately.

(not that there's any reason for me to chime in, just hoping anyone who might be tempted to feel wronged or upset by the outcome might see this and consider the bigger picture I guess)

The spending package seems to include aid for Israel

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2882/text

Would this resolve the market yes?

If I read the comments correctly, conditionality was established by Biden's memo, and we were just waiting on aid to be passed to resolve yes, unless someone can convince @mattyb that the memo should not count as conditionality.

@JeremiahKellick @traders as i’m reading it, this bill seems to allocate a number of funds to israel for defense purposes. that sounds like aid to me. does anyone want to put up a dissenting argument? if not, we’re just waiting for Biden.

@mattyb unless the conditions are in the bill I wouldn't count that as it being conditioned aid, which afaik there aren't any conditions in the bill itself.

@DrEthan I don't think the conditions need to be included in the bill itself if they were outlaid as new conditions prior, though. I don't think it has to be all contained in a single place or not applicable at all.

@DrEthan as outlined before (comments below), when the memo came it was confirmed as conditionality, and it was delivered to future aid recipients.

@shankypanky

This is what conditioned aid looks like.

@DrEthan the market description is fairly clear that any route to revoking aid counts here.

In the next package of US aid to Israel, will there be any conditionality whatsoever, under which aid could be revoked based on Israel’s actions?

@shankypanky

And this is what non conditioned aid looks like

@mattyb there is no conditions "in the package of aid" there is talk outside of the aid package but not in it. For example, just because Chuck Schumer called for elections in Israel after the war doesn't mean it's a condition for this aid package.

@DrEthan do you agree that this Biden memo lays out conditionality for all US aid? https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2024/02/08/national-security-memorandum-on-safeguards-and-accountability-with-respect-to-transferred-defense-articles-and-defense-services/

We’re not talking about a senate floor speech, we’re talking about an action from the executive

@DrEthan or are you trying to make the argument that “with the next package…” vs. “in the next package…” has a distinction, and in next to be in the text of the aid package?

@mattyb yes all aid not in this aid package. Especially since like I showed there are not limitations or conditions in this package. And if there were I highly doubt it would have passed.

@mattyb yes they are similar but explicitly distinct since I don't think the package would have passed the house of there were explicit conditions in the bill.

@DrEthan i am actually pretty amenable to this argument.

Will the US put any conditions on their next aid package to Israel?

In the next package of US aid to Israel

“on” and “in” are both prepositions which deal with things being attached. “with” is more associated.

think about putting chips in a sandwich, or getting chips with a sandwich. not the same thing…

@mattyb I think it is especially important because the memo Biden put out was not voted on by the house or the senate, but this package was.

@DrEthan i buy that argument a lot less. Biden’s the Commander-in-Chief and has the power to have his Sec’s of State and Defense ensure that laws aren’t being broken without an act of congress.

if this said “with” instead of “in” + “on”, i would probably still be defending this as a YES

@mattyb I'm saying it's especially important because if there was conditions in the bill it would never have passed not because the president doesn't have that kind of power. The president can't give aid out without the consent of Congress.

@mattyb I guess to plead my case here I'd just say it feels misleading after the earlier comments that the memo would likely count and implication that we were mostly waiting to see if any kind of aid would be passed.

I can't be alone in this because I don't think this market would ever have been so high for so long if not for that. People who disagreed with the memo counting had a lot of time to bring it up before now.

That said, looks like most other yes bettors already bailed so 180ing again at this point could arguably be worse. 🤷

@JeremiahKellick I'll second that as I had a substantial position and while I understand this recent comment exchange I did stay in (and have lost a fair bit backing out now unfortunately) based on the assumption that the memo counts and the only contingency between yes and NA was the approval of aid, not whether the memo would apply.

@JeremiahKellick @shankypanky ill be honest, when I wrote this question last November, I didn’t anticipate all of this nuance and complexity being in my phrasing here nearly 5 months later. i’m expecting plentiful 1star reviews here, and that’s ok, i understand the sentiment.

ultimately, i’ve been trying to be as maximally amenable here as i can be, and have accepted what i have viewed as the best argument at all times. the memo folks made the best argument for that time being, with no one mentioning the aid needing to be in the package itself.

i have no stake in this market, and am not trying to mislead people, or profit myself, just run this show as honestly as i can. if people think that the criteria here are too vague for a resolution, and this needs to be n/a’d, please let me know.

@mattyb It's been firmly and explicitly established for 6 weeks that the market would be resolved YES after any aid is passed, that "it just needs to pass now". That's a concrete statement about the resolution criteria that has informed 6 weeks of betting and has gone unchallenged for 6 weeks, and should absolutely take precedence over which particular preposition was used. You shouldn't be changing the market criteria based on a subjective interpretation of wording that would push the effective probability of YES down to 0% when the expectation you've set for how the market would be resolved has had traders at >75% and would be much higher now if the criteria had been unchanged.

@beepbooper forgive me but i suspect you may have some biases towards a singular resolution here

While I think this should count, I am still open to others’ interpretations.

In my text 1mo ago. There have been no other interpretations posted since then.

Let me continue to think about this. I’ll talk to other market creators.

@beepbooper the market went down so low because I sold a lot of my large position and it's gone back up because of your specific) individual yes buys. that's not in contradiction to your other point but saying that "traders" made the shift in probabilities seems to account for a lot more than these movements. you bought yes after the creator (Matt) said he'll resolve no, because you saw the above comments which weren't even addressed yet by him...

I'm also biased and pretty disappointed to have already taken a loss on something that felt really well established weeks ago in earlier comments but I'm still considering any response to Matt's suggestion - it's early here and I need coffee first lol

re: me being biased

obviously yeah lol, i was going to share this in my initial comment but couldn't settle on how exactly to put it, but i'll share now: when i saw stefanie withdrew i checked the comments to see if anything had changed and misread a bit and thought it hadn't been changed (mistakenly thought your dismissal of the argument that Biden's place as part of the executive branch meant that his conditions weren't relevant was a dismissal of the argument altogether). I decided to hop on it and try to act quickly and that was definitely a mistake - I should've paused longer to figure out what had happened but I admittedly couldn't fathom that the expectation for market resolution would change this close to it being wrapped up

When talking about traders I was also just referring to everything before DrEthan's comment was made, obviously everything that happened afterwards was a very different question entirely

@beepbooper ultimately you bought in based on the last message that it was resolving no and I understand why but still risky. had I expected this conversation to shift yet again I obviously wouldn't have sold my positions at a loss because they were lucrative but it also seemed pretty determined and I didn't want to lose even more heavily despite my personal feelings that the outcome was established weeks ago. idk.

@JeremiahKellick @mattyb yeah ngl I saw all the discussion and the market-creator's (dubious) clarifications regarding what counts as a condition on aid and sold off, lmao

@shankypanky Yep, I understand your position. Originally I was invested pretty heavily in NO, but Biden's memo caught me off guard and if six weeks ago I had thought of DrEthan's preposition argument and thought it would work I absolutely would have made it! Personally I think a condition that has no practical chance of being invoked isn't worth anything but I accepted the memo as a technically valid form of conditionality at the time and do genuinely think it's now most fair to stick to what's been established.

I held onto most of my NO shares hoping that the bill just wouldn't get through before April and I'd get my mana back with an N/A, but when I saw it had passed, I sold the rest of what I had, ate my loss, and bought a bit of YES shares. If I had known that any of this would have happened I definitely would've held NO and waited to see what happened or sold when you caused it to dip back down.

(Matt posting my profit graph was quite funny to me because you can clearly see the big red spike down I had on the 10th after the memo. The other 2 big spikes down were because of Hanania lol)

@JeremiahKellick The reason I didn't say anything until now is that I was waiting until the actual aid package was released and passed, if the package agreed with the memo I would have sold no and not said anything. But because the package didn't have anything in it that conditioned the aid it gave large amounts of credence to my argument. I still hold that the package would never have passed Congress if it had any conditions in it which is why I felt confident in buying no when I first did.

@mattyb Haha look, I can definitely sympathize with your dilemma here. It's an unwinnable situation where a legitimate argument can be made for either resolution and whichever one you pick will leave some people feeling cheated.

And I don't even think you even made any egregious errors here. You mostly got unlucky. Despite it being against my interests, I'll admit the “In the next package” argument is a good one. Reading it again now, it does sound to me like the conditionality should have to be in the text of the bill itself. I don't necessarily think it must be interpreted that way because “package of aid” != “bill”, but it's the interpretation my brain leans towards.

To further build an argument against myself, you never said the Biden memo definitely counted. Your wording left open the possibility that someone could convince you otherwise.

But ideally you would've reread the description and noticed this feature of the wording before suggesting the Biden memo would count. That's an understandable mistake, however, because obviously no one else has noticed that before now either.

At this point I think resolving N/A is your least-bad option here because it looks like we've had both yes and no bettors who've been thrown off by your comments now. But I can see a legitimate argument for any resolution, and no matter what you do it'll make some people angry. So do whatever you think is most fair.

@JeremiahKellick I think at most this should resolve 50/50 even though I believe that the description is pretty clear that a memo released outside of the aid package does not count as being a condition in the aid package. Resolving N/A doesn't make much sense to me since the only reason in the description for resolving N/A is if the bill doesn't pass.