Congo plane crash settlement

Nothing like a resettlement of a question. That way so many more people can win. It seems to me that we are still nearly 3 months after launch of the site still dealing with a consistency problem. There are 10 of you Hubdub admins, I suggest you get together and decide a consistent way to settle questions. I will buy the first round of drinks, take 1,000 hubdub dollars and leave a big tip.

Right, having done some further investigation, this was settled on initial reports which claimed to be accurate but have now obviously been revised.

To be fair is pretty unusual for air crashes since airlines generally have good figures about the numbers of people involved. In the case of other types of accident we would have regarded early eyewitness reports as suspect. We should therefore have suspended the question pending more authoritative information, but it being an air crash we assumed the given figures to be more definite than they turned out to be.

The issue is not the same as the merger question, since the press reports there were definitive reports of an actual event (ie. a decision by the company), and the disagreement was caused by a subsequent U-turn. Here the reports were broadly speculative, and therefore were simply not good enough sources to settle the question.

I appreciate your concern crudsy that these types of question are more open to interpretation than sporting or money-market questions, and I can see the appeal for many users in sticking to these well-defined 'logical' markets, and we would like to feel that the site supports them in playing the game their way.

Other users are interested in areas where less well-defined 'logical' questions exist, and we intend to continue serving them as well. As far as possible this will be through providing rules and procedures which make these questions better-defined, but there is always going to be some room for disagreement on certain questions. I guess if this sort of resolution process doesn't appeal to you, that you are best off avoiding these questions

IF the death toll reaches 50, then of course the question should be settled as is. But if not, then I don't really "get" the idea of just letting it go.

This question could easily have remained open for weeks or months more. So where is the need to rush to settlement?

It reminds me of the questions about temperature reaching a certain amount in a certain place on a certain day. If someone reads the forecast on the morning of the day in question, and submits that for settlement (reasoning that the forecast is probably correct. so why wait for the official data), then is that okay? The initial reports, when no-one could have known the actual death toll, are essentially forecasts, guesses, estimates. The particular situation demonstrates how those guesses can be wrong - they were based on the estimated number of people on the plane, which is not where the majority of deaths occurred.

It suggests to me that for questions that relate to disasters and counts, it's more than reasonable to wait for official confirmed figures. Maybe it's just me, but I've never felt that "getting it right" ruined my experience at Hubdub, while I have felt that dubious and incorrect settlements have.