If it is not banned press no if it is press yes
Update 2025-03-05 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): Updated Resolution Criteria:
The market will resolve as yes regardless of TikTok’s status on April 1st.
1,000@ian Never seen anyone argue about what "by" means in any other market other than these TikTok ones, tbh.
@Mana A later unban does not effect the resolution of this market. (Note the use of the word "by.") Furthermore, inaccurate statements by the market creator should also have no impact. If the creator resolves this market incorrectly, the mods can simply override this.
@Mana what precedent do you have for mods overruling the creators resolution in a situation like this? It is ambiguous, as it could mean “have been banned once” or “have a ban in effect by this date”. If mods overrule that would be an overreach imo.
@Tylerg The creator, and other people, seemed to have a bizarre notion that TikTok was not actually banned when it was. This was an issue on Polymarket, too. Lots of crazy people flooded the comments. I think they thought that a self-enforced ban wasn't a ban, for some reason. Like, the government would have to come in and forcibly shut off servers for it to count. Won't speak for the creator though, I'm interested to know why he thinks it wasn't banned. But in any case, he's wrong. Every single betting platform on the planet has already resolved this to yes.
And the market says "by," not "on." So clearly any ban after market creation but before April 1st was intended to count. I would probably agree that it's unbanned now. Trump has promised to not enforce, US IPs can access it again, and Apple and Google have secured no-action letters to host the TikTok app on their stores once again. So yeah, it's unbanned now. But make no mistake, it was banned on midnight January 19th. And given the usage of the word "by," and given that January 19th comes before April 1, this market can go yes, and there is no ambiguity.
@Mana And yet mods have not, in fact, resolved it to NO. I don't think they're as inclined to interfere with markets over this sort of phrasing-ambiguity as I think you think they are. There's one reading—your preferred one—which takes 'by' to mean 'before'. There's another, however, which takes 'by' to mean 'at the time of', as in expressions such as "by this evening, the store will be closed". That expression will not be true if the store closes and then reopens in the early afternoon.
@Mana ...or you could, I suppose, simply verbally bludgeon the market creator into switching which of the two interpretations they mean midstream for the sake of satisfying the loudest person in the comments section. Surely this is a great victory for you! Surely you are now satisfied! And I have learned a great lesson from observing the beauty of your predictive skill!
The lesson is that, if I ever see you being overconfident in a market elsewhere, I should make sure to be vocal in the comments section arguing against your preferred interpretation of the market, so that the creator feels more supported about their intended resolution-criteria and won't be as easily pressured to change midstream.
You have made an enemy this day. Do please enjoy your ill-earned mana while it lasts; I will endeavor to retrieve it from you before too long.
@Tulip There is no ambiguity about what the word "by" means. Even in the phrase "by this evening, the store will be closed", that statement is completely true if the store closes and then re-opens. It just isn't normal for stores to close and then re-open in the same day. This is just how English works.
Further, what the creator means shouldn't have anything to do with it. It's a matter of objectively interpreting the words the creator used. Bringing the creators intent into it is just dishonest.
@RiverBellamy Agreed. The grocery store example is just a silly mental gymnastics attempt to use gricean implicatures in the setting of telling a friend that they had better get to the grocery store before the evening to argue that by means on. Obviously this is not the case. Nobody uses the word like that, unless they don't understand English very well.
@RiverBellamy It's pretty normal for certain sorts of stores—particularly small ones without many employees—to close in the middle of the day for lunch breaks before reopening. It would still be dishonest to say in the morning, of one of those stores, that it's going to be closed by five, if it actually stays open until eight.
And the idea that there's some Objective Correct Reading for a given set of words used by a creator, independent of the creator's intention, strikes me as blatantly silly. There are many metrics which take in a set of words and return a meaning—you could ask what the creator intended, or you could ask what the majority of the creator's readers interpreted the words to mean, or suchlike—but English isn't a language with a definitive unambiguous reference-manual. Prescriptive linguistics is false. Words mean what people believe them to mean. So there's no objective way to determine which of those metrics is the Correct one; it's just down to local convention. Local convention on Manifold is to assign substantial weight to creator intentions.
It would still be dishonest to say in the morning, of one of those stores, that it's going to be closed by five, if it actually stays open until eight.
It would be dishonest in the sense that you are using a true but misleading statement to try to create in your hearer's mind a false belief. That is a kind of dishonesty, but it does not make the statement false.
As for objectively correct reading, you realize that our entire legal system is premised on words having objective meanings independent of anyone's intentions, right? Our whole society is built on this notion. Every conversation anyone ever has is built on this notion. There are lots of nuances, yes, but nuances do not make the basic notion of words having objective meanings false. And using someone's intentions to override objective meanings is another form of dishonesty. By endorsing it, you are telling me a lot about your own integrity.
@RiverBellamy Legal English is a different and more-strongly-specified language from ordinary conversational English. And, still, not one with any reference manual stronger than "it means whatever the court system concludes that it means". Ordinary English-speakers wouldn't consider growing wheat to feed to one's own animals, within a state, to be interstate commerce; America's courts have decided that interstate commerce is a wide enough concept to include that activity. This was, and still is, a matter of controversy! Legal English is a language where words will tend to be predictably interpreted in certain rigid ways, much moreso than in ordinary English; but there are still limits to that predictability, and sometimes courts will make surprising decisions like that one, and then everyone has to update their predictions accordingly going forward. That's not objective meaning; that's just strong consensus on meaning. The two are distinct; mistaking the one for the other will lead to confusion in cases where the consensus changes or breaks down.
@Tulip I think you are using the word "objective" a bit differently than I am. I am not claiming that everything is predictable or unambiguous. And certainly there are times when a court just interprets something wrong, and things get built on top of that misinterpretation, and eventually we all just go with it cause stare decisis. I think that's what's going on with "interstate" commerce. The point of an objective meaning for words isn't to remove all possible ambiguity and make everything perfectly predictable, though it does help with that and that is good. The point is to not be manipulable. When we insist on objective meanings, what we are doing is excluding arguments based on hidden intentions or mental states, and therefor making the situation less subject to manipulation and exploitation. If we allow anyone's intention to govern interpretation, then that person is in a position to manipulate and exploit and steal from everyone else. That is unacceptable in law, it is unacceptable in prediction markets, and it is unacceptable in most everyday conversations. So we interpret words according to their objective meanings - not necessarily unambiguous meanings, not necessarily without argument, but we only allow arguments based on public facts, not private mental states. When you say that we should consider the market creator's intention, what you are saying is that we should open ourselves up to being taken advantage of, and that makes you the kind of person who is dangerous to have around.
@RiverBellamy This seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of what communication is. People have private mental states; they want to convey things about these states to other people; they do so through the medium of words, because we haven't yet developed higher-fidelity modes of communication for most contexts. The words are an indirection-layer, not the core point. The speaker translates their thoughts into words; the listeners translate the speaker's words into thoughts; and at no point do the words themselves have any relevant meaning beyond that intended by the speaker and that parsed by the listeners.
(One could argue they have some irrelevant meaning—one could, if so inclined, parse the Japanese word パン (which is traditionally Romanized as 'pan', and means 'bread') as a reference to a piece of cookware—but this would be a misunderstanding, or a form of trolling, or an exercise in multilingual wordplay, rather than an accurate reading of what the speaker meant.)
It's useful, for this process to work well, for people to coordinate on assigning the same meanings to the same words—the more consistent different people are in their use of language, the easier it is to avoid misunderstandings—but, fundamentally, the thing we're doing with those meanings is using them to ascribe mental states to speakers. This person believes X. This person wants me to believe Y. This person is performing speech-act Z. Et cetera.
If someone uses language in ways their listeners are unaccustomed to, they may be misunderstood. And sometimes it's useful to allow these misunderstandings to persist. It's more important that different people have generally the same understanding of a law than it is that the law is taken to mean what its writers were attempting to convey, in cases where the two diverge, and it's useful for those generally-understood meanings to be stable, such that the writers can't easily correct any misunderstandings and so divergences are likely.
But this is not the universal state of all human communication; there are many other cases where it's more useful to understand what someone intended to convey than to understand what most people would interpret them as having intended to convey. For example, if someone says "my foot hurts" when they mean "my hand hurts"—due to, for example, being too distracted by the pain to run error-checking on their verbal generator—it's useful to recognize that, actually, they're cradling their hand and wincing whenever it shifts at a certain angle, and walking normally on their foot, and thus probably mean their hand. Optionally ask a clarifying question to be sure, if they seem up to answering one; but responding by setting out to treat their foot unquestioningly, on the basis of taking likely parsing-by-most-people of their words as priority over one's understanding of what they were trying to convey, would be a clear error for most possible speakers.
(There likely exist some small number of people who speak so precisely, and misspeak so rarely, that someone who knows them well would in fact be warranted in responding to this situation by treating their foot. I have yet to knowingly encounter any such people myself, and would be very surprised if they comprised more than a tiny minority of the population.)
So I reject your claim of 'this is unacceptable in most everyday conversations'. This is default in most everyday conversations.
As for prediction markets: I think there's a place for both kinds. For prediction markets adjudicated on a "what are most readers likely to interpret this to mean?" basis (or, if you prefer, a court-like "what are these specific expert readers likely to interpret this to mean?" basis) and ones adjudicated on a "what did the market-creator intend?" basis. The argument for the former is that, if the moderators are good, it will resolve more predictably and thus produce better predictions, compared with a system subject to the opaque whims of creators. The argument for the latter is that you can't reliably trust the moderators to be good, and it's better to open up competition by letting each individual market-creator build their own reputation for clarity-or-lack-thereof about their intentions rather than trust the market-platform's centralized moderation to yield the clearest possible results.
Manifold, historically, has leaned much more in the latter direction than the other major prediction-market-platforms have—this is, for example, why there's a rating system for market-resolutions—and this is among their comparative advantages, and a valuable niche to fill. So I'd rather they not converge more than necessary towards adjudication-by-centralized-moderation-team-towards-the-meaning-most-people-would-read-into-a-market-description, in cases where market-creators haven't specifically requested this; it would be a convergence towards the more widely-implemented standard in a context where their divergence from that standard is actively one of their value-propositions.
@Mana tikotok is currently in the App Store and google play store and available to everyone in the US if it is still available on April 1st this market will resolve as no if it is banned on April 1st then it will be resolved as yes