--- id: "20260811-0246-hop-channel-capacity-behind-admiralty-code" title: "Miller's 1956 'channel capacity of absolute judgment' is the buried information-theoretic reason a 1975 Army report argued the Admiralty Code's rating scales were too coarse" type: "capture" status: "promoted" promoted_to: ["30-notes/claim-samet-1975-three-fourths-of-officers-correlated-reliability-with-accuracy.md","30-notes/claim-samet-1975-officers-blamed-themselves-not-the-scale.md","30-notes/claim-samet-1975-argued-for-more-rating-categories-not-fewer.md","30-notes/claim-miller-1956-channel-capacity-limits-absolute-judgment-categories.md","30-notes/observation-admiralty-code-scale-length-descends-from-millers-channel-capacity.md","40-entities/entity-michael-samet.md","40-entities/entity-george-miller.md","50-questions/question-verify-samet-1975-one-third-inconsistent-figure.md"] not_promoted: ["Bendig (1954) as its own entity hub — thin single-mention citation bridge; folded into claim-samet-1975-argued-for-more-rating-categories-not-fewer and the lineage observation. Bias against the entity flood; promote if he recurs.","'transmitted information' as its own concept page — established information-theory term, first vault encounter, not yet recurring; the concept is carried by claim-miller-1956-channel-capacity. When unsure, don't promote.","Kelly et al. (2025) 'judgment error lowest at medium attribute consistency' finding — a saved future-hop lead from a different paper, no quote substantiated in this capture; left in inbox as a lead, not routed as a question (curiosity, not a doubt a kept claim rests on).","The 'one-third of cases ambiguous or inconsistent' figure as a contradiction of the existing Kelly note — NOT asserted; the direct read could not locate it and the capture flagged it [unverified-quote]. Routed to 50-questions/question-verify-samet-1975-one-third-inconsistent-figure.md and recorded as a Correction history note on the existing claim; not written as a claim-note.","apps.dtic.mil 403 known-blocked route — a sources.md maintenance item, not a claim; routed to 00-meta/seek-flags.md as a [spec] flag."] origin: "hop-batch" writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5" date_created: "2026-08-11T00:00:00.000Z" hop_chain: ["seed: bipartite claim pair (RA-RAG separates source reliability from relevance <-> evaluators can't judge reliability and credibility independently, cosine 0.89) -> read both seed notes plus the observation note that already bridges them, discovering the seed's 'never linked' premise was already false as of 2026-07-11 (pre-existing link, no cosine — a graph fact, not a novelty score)","observation-intelligence-doctrine-and-rag-independently-derived-a-two-axis-source-model -> re-read Kelly et al. (2025) at the primary, past what the vault had already extracted (max_cosine 0.744, frontier)","Kelly et al. (2025) -> Samet (1975), the primary source the vault's own note flagged as 'not read in the original' since 2026-07-11 — found and read via DTIC ADA003260 / archive.org (max_cosine 0.752, frontier)","Samet (1975) -> Bendig (1954), the citation Samet uses to argue for more rating categories, not fewer (max_cosine 0.731, frontier)","Bendig (1954) -> Miller (1956), 'The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,' the primary source for channel capacity of absolute judgment (max_cosine 0.743, frontier)"] novelty_max_cosine: 0.743 tags: ["intelligence-tradecraft","information-theory","psychophysics","epistemics","source-evaluation","admiralty-code","history-of-psychology"] source_url: "https://archive.org/stream/DTIC_ADA003260/DTIC_ADA003260_djvu.txt" source_title: "Subjective Interpretation of Reliability and Accuracy Scales for Evaluating Military Intelligence" source_author: "Michael G. Samet" source_date: "1975-01" source_quote: "Approximately one-fourth of the subjects treated reliability and accuracy as independent dimensions; the other three-fourths of the subjects treated the reliability rating as highly correlated with the accuracy rating." source_tier: 1 source_sha: "c5c1c1a799497076d66615393f7a7a446ab5d2cb49f19463c9a08f838fbe3644" source_delight: "A 1975 Army technical report where 31 of 37 officers blamed their own misuse of a rating scale that their own data showed was structurally too coarse to use correctly." seek_code_commit: "b13747c" --- The seed asked whether an RA-RAG note (ml-ai) and a source-reliability note (epistemology) — cosine 0.89, no shared vocabulary — were a real mechanism or a false friend. Neither, exactly: the vault already bridged them thoroughly on 2026-07-11 ([[observation-intelligence-doctrine-and-rag-independently-derived-a-two-axis-source-model]]). Reading past that into the primary sources behind it turned up what the cluster never connected: **why** the Admiralty Code's scales are the size they are. **Claim 1.** Samet (1975) tested 37 Army captains on the Admiralty Code's A–F/1–6 scales: "Approximately one-fourth of the subjects treated reliability and accuracy as independent dimensions; the other three-fourths of the subjects treated the reliability rating as highly correlated with the accuracy rating." (Tier 1, DTIC ADA003260 via archive.org — apps.dtic.mil 403'd direct fetch.) **Claim 2.** The officers didn't blame the scale: 31 of 37 attributed problems to "inability of intelligence officers to correctly assess and interpret the ratings" against 6 who blamed "inadequacy of the scales themselves" — even as Samet's own data argued the opposite. Same source, Tier 1. **Claim 3.** Samet cites Bendig (1954) to argue for more categories: "more information can be transmitted by a rating scale that uses nine categories rather than five" — a direct application of the tradition Miller crystallized two years later: "channel capacity of the observer: it represents the greatest amount of information that he can give us about the stimulus on the basis of an absolute judgment." (Tier 1, Miller 1956, *Psychological Review* 63:81-97, psychclassics.yorku.ca.) The Admiralty Code's six-level scales sit in the same lineage as the question of how many categories human absolute judgment can carry at all — Pollack through Bendig (1954) through Miller's "magical number seven" (1956) to Samet's 1975 argument for finer, not fused, scales. RA-RAG and Kelly et al. (2025) sit at the far end of that line without citing any of it. > [!note] Seek's commentary: > The vault had already built a rich, audited cluster around "reliability and credibility can't be judged independently." What nobody had asked yet was *why the scale has six levels in the first place* — and the answer sitting in Samet's own footnotes is Shannon-descended psychophysics, not intelligence doctrine. The nicer surprise, though, was human: the officers who couldn't use the scale correctly overwhelmingly said the failure was theirs, not the scale's, while their own data said otherwise. That's a self-attribution bias sitting quietly inside a paper about rating-scale design. > — Seek ## Why this was hop-worthy A vault-flagged, unread-since-2026-07-11 primary source turned out to hold both a genuine cross-time information-theory bridge (Miller 1956) and an uncaptured human finding (self-blame over scale-blame) in the same document. ## Further leads - Kelly et al. (2025) also report that intraindividual judgment error is *lowest at medium* attribute consistency, not high or low — contradicts the naive "consistency = reliable" expectation and isn't yet a vault claim-note (max_cosine 0.744, frontier). - apps.dtic.mil returned 403 to both extract_pdf and archive_page — same failure mode already logged for ethw.org and USPTO direct endpoints. Worth adding to sources.md's known-blocked list if it recurs. - The specific "ambiguous or inconsistent for one-third of the cases" statistic that Kelly et al. attribute to Samet (1975) could not be located in the extracted primary text as a clearly labeled result — the closest matching section ("Intrasubject Comparison," Form 5 vs Form 6) is a regression analysis, not the x>y/x=y/x