Resolution by majority of credible media reports at market expiry as judged by me; I won't trade on my own answers.
Update 2025-12-15 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): If most information remains uncertain at the original market expiry date (Jan 12, 2026), the deadline will be extended for questions that remain uncertain.
Update 2025-12-17 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): For the purposes of resolving whether a victim was specifically targeted, a victim is defined as someone who was physically harmed in the attack.
Update 2025-12-18 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - Deadliest shooting: Defined as occurring in the US (current 2025 record: 7 deaths).
The creator is waiting for further hospital discharges to rule out the possibility of the death count exceeding this record before resolving.
Update 2025-12-19 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Creator will wait before resolving answers despite new information from the press conference, citing authorities' previous errors in suspect identification. Resolutions will not be made extremely quickly - patience will continue to be applied as it has been throughout the market.
Update 2025-12-19 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Scope of "Brown University shooting": The MIT killing will be counted as part of the same progression (unless evidence to the contrary arises) since the shooter did not attempt to rejoin normal life in between incidents.
"Found dead" interpretation: For resolution purposes, being found dead counts as being "caught."
Intent/targeting questions: Evidence does not yet establish "targeting" with certainty. These questions will be resolved once authorities access the shooter's devices and accounts.
Update 2026-01-11 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Resolution timing: Market will be resolved after the close date (approximately one day from 2025-12-19), after the creator has dinner. Resolution will be based on consensus from multiple reputable news sources at that time.
Victim death assumption: Any victims who haven't died by resolution time will be assumed to not die from the shooting for resolution purposes.
Missing evidence: The emails referenced in audio recordings have not been found and will be assumed to not contain useful information for resolution.
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I have asked Claude Sonnet 4.5 to help me to resolve this question, since it can synthesize multiple news sources pretty well. I asked it to choose five news sources that do not duplicate each other, and then manually added the Brown Daily Herald, the source I have found most informative. This gave a list of:
Brown Daily Herald
PBS NewsHour
NBC News
CNN
ABC News
CBS News
I then asked it, "what is the view of each of these sources, if any, of [question]" on the questions that I was not comfortable with my own intuitions. I manually reviewed the links it cited for relevance, to avoid AI hallucination, and found no oddities.
As to the shooter's political motivation, it reports "complete consensus among all sources" that this was not a politically motivated attack, nor that the shooter had left-wing, centrist, or right-wing political orientation.
Likewise, Claude reports "complete consensus" that no media source used the term or FBI criteria for "nihilistic violent extremist".
Claude's view is that four of the six sources considered the death of Prof. Loureiro was part of the same killings, and that that death was clearly specifically targeted. I am going to treat four-of-six as sufficient consensus. THIS IS THE ONE RESOLUTION WHERE CLAUDE DISAGREES WITH THE MANIFOLD CONSENSUS.
The sources are unanimous that there was nothing to be described as a manifesto, and that the video recording cannot be described as a manifesto.
Similarly the sources are unanimous that there is no evidence for AI interaction at all, let alone AI psychosis.
Finally, Claude assesses that all six sources report extensive connections of the shooting to physics; it is in each case framed as the "most plausible theory", which is probably all we will know.
I don't see any value in holding this market open further: The only evidence that is still missing are the emails the shooter mentions in his video, and if those even actually existed we must assume they have reached law enforcement and contained nothing of any use. I am therefore closing out this market. Thank you all for your participation.
@nonnihil "Shooter is not motivated by politics" should resolve YES
NO would mean that the shooter was motivated by politics
It's a reverse, not "Shooter is motivated by politics"
This market closes one day from right now, more or less, at which point(*) I will collect the most recent coverage from a few reputable news sources and resolve these questions based on the consensus of those sources. I will assume at that time that any victims who haven't died will not die of this.
I don't expect that the non-motive-related propositions will be hard. The one possibly useful piece of information that seems to be missing are the emails referenced in the weird audio rambles. But if those emails even existed, they haven't turned up; I'll assume that they don't have anything useful to say.
If you have any other information, this would be the time to share it!
(* Well, after dinner, really)
@Velaris His grievance seems to be somehow related to his time at Brown as a physics student. Seems like a pretty reasonable YES resolution based on the preponderance of evidence.
@AdamBraff Resolves no since only 2 were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Brown_University_shooting#Victims
@Velaris agree (insofar as my input is helpful to the market creator for resolution), would just wait until the deadline expires tomorrow + a day to check the news before resolving
@GuyCohen I'm not sure why this option has such high probability, while the shooter did not state a motive in the recently released video tapes, he did briefly discuss politics during his rambling
@Cactus He didn't say anything about politics being a motive at all though. He just mentioned the fact that Trump mentioned him
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/01/06/metro/brown-university-mit-shooter-video-confessions/
Well heck. That's not going to help a whole lot on any of these. It would take nine psychiatrists, a cryptologist, and a seance to make much sense of that rambling.
Nothing to support a yes on any motive, I think, but I've got another few days before resolution date to watch the consensus emerge.
@nonnihil Does the video recording count as a manifesto? Broadly defined, a manifesto just seems to be a public statement of aims, which this seems to satisfy, but in the video he also says he doesn't care about being famous and having a manifesto, and that he could say a lot more but chooses not to. He's also unsure of whether or not he wants the statement to be made public.
What he said about Trump also seems fairly neutral and apolitical:
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/memos/PM-602-0193-DiversityVisaHolds-20251219.pdf is a real-ass policy document directing agency action and citing Brown; that's a YES for "crack down". On the technical question of whether this resolution should only consider immigrants already in the US, that documents inter alia directs a pause of the I-485 process which applies only to immigrants within the US, so in my judgment it is still a YES.
https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/providence/most-brown-u-shooting-victims-no-longer-in-critical-condition/ now indicates all victims no longer critical; I'm bringing "deadliest" to NO. I'm leaving "three" open for now, because one of the survivors is short a lung and people die of old wounds smaller than that all the time.
https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025/12/shooting-live-updates and the MA press conference and a couple other reports say that the two guns used in the shootings were 9mm handguns; those do not fall under either the CT or MA definitions of "assault weapon" and I am resolving that to NO.
Reports I have seen on motive and intent have not cited much evidence, so I am leaving motive and intent questions open.
https://www.brown.edu/news/2025-12-19/shooting-suspect-identified
Law enforcement officials confirmed at a press conference that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was identified as the suspect. Neves Valente was enrolled at Brown as a graduate student from Fall 2000 to Spring 2001, but he has no active affiliation with Brown and has not been affiliated with Brown since 2003. He was not a current student, was not an employee and did not receive a degree from the University, attending for only three semesters as a graduate student until taking a leave in 2001 and formally withdrawing effective July 31, 2003.
An eventful evening! Seemed at times like the reporters asking questions at the RI press conference were reading off of this list!
I'm going to wait a bit before churning through resolutions, given the authorities' impressive abilities to point at the wrong suspect, but it sure seems like this is the guy. But don't expect I'm going to resolve everything extremely quickly -- patience has served us well in this market so far. If you added one of these answers, especially feel free to suggest how your answer should be interpreted and resolved.
I lived for several years in Brookline, and did a physics minor at MIT in the late 90s, so this all is suddenly quite close to home. What an odd turn of events!
@nonnihil "At least one victim specifically targeted" is tricky because it turns on whether "Brown university shooting" encompasses the broader spree. Good luck with that one
@nonnihil Okay, here's another round of resolutions.
Since I don't see any evidence or even real speculation to the contrary, I'm going to go with the authorities having got the right guy. So white male, Brown student, connected to MIT shooting, linked to another shooting, dies prior to capture are YES.
I'm going to count found dead as caught -- that's my own inclination and that of the answer's author, and we're not going to get any more information on this. I think we all learned a bit about wording our answers more carefully, though.
Pres. Trump and Sec. Noem have made public statements about curtailing the H-1 lottery in response to the shooting, but I can't find any actual official proclamation or executive order. If someone sees something binding on official letterhead, let me know. Especially I guess anything outright lusophobic?
There are still enough students hospitalized to cover the spread on "three students" and "deadliest"; those remain open for a little longer. Note that one of the survivors is quite badly wounded, and we ought all the be a bit circumspect in respect to that.
I don't believe we have evidence to resolve any "targeted" question yet, nor politics, motivation, ideology, or even residency. I'm as impatient as you are.
I do think that we should count the MIT killing as part of the same progression unless evidence to the contrary arises -- the shooter does not seem to have made any attempt to rejoin normal life in between -- but I don't think the evidence we have now establishes "targeting" with any certainty: Did the killer intend to kill when we went to Brookline, or did he intend something else?
All of the intent/targeting questions may clarify as the authorities access the shooter's devices and accounts and so forth.
@nonnihil While the shooter is the same as the murderer of the MIT professor, I don't think we should count the MIT professor as one of the victims of the Brown University shooting. I think most people are trading under the assumption that this market is only referring to the events that occurred on Brown University's campus.
@nonnihil does/would/will the cancellation of the DV1 program resolve "Trump uses this shooting to crack down on immigrants, crime, or “the left” to yes?
@bens When I wrote it, I conceived of it as something where the primary desire was in targeting either the Brown physics department specifically or the field of physics more generally, as opposed to just generically Brown students, a particular individual, or some unrelated political cause. I think it should resolve YES.