Samet's 1975 critique of the Admiralty Code argued for more rating categories, not fewer — citing Bendig (1954) that a nine-point scale transmits more information than a five-point one

intelligence-tradecraftsource-evaluationadmiralty-codeinformation-theorypsychophysicsrating-scalesepistemics

Michael G. Samet's 1975 US Army Research Institute technical paper (ARI Technical Paper 260) did not conclude that the Admiralty Code's A–F / 1–6 scales should be coarsened. On the question of resolution it argued the opposite: that the scales were too coarse to carry the information analysts were trying to put through them, and that finer scales would perform better. In the discussion (p. 19) Samet holds that "the rating scales lack sensitivity in grading the degree of reliability and accuracy," that the average gap between adjacent levels "suggests that there is room for finer discriminations, which are not permitted by only five categories," and grounds the point in Bendig (1954): "more information can be transmitted by a rating scale that uses nine categories rather than five."

Resolution and axis count are separate questions, and Samet answered them in opposite directions. On axis count his own recommendation ran toward collapse: the implications section (p. 20) states that "the two-dimensional evaluation should be replaced," because the accuracy rating dominates interpretation of a joint rating and the two scales are frequently correlated. What he proposed in its place is a single likelihood-of-truth rating on a quantitative scale — a probability or odds scale — that integrates source reliability along with everything else, while a source's reliability index is retained separately for collection management rather than for grading reports. His subjects agreed: asked whether the double-dimension scale should be replaced by a single-dimension one, they split 21 to 16 in favour (questionnaire, p. 17). Samet therefore wanted more rungs on fewer axes — finer resolution, delivered by fusing reliability and accuracy into one number.

This is a direct application of the information-theoretic tradition that Miller crystallized in 1956: a rating scale's category count is limited by the observer's channel capacity, and the design question is how many distinguishable rungs a single axis can carry — not whether to have the axis at all. Samet's move is to treat scale length as a transmitted-information problem and prescribe accordingly.

The direction of the critique matters for the vault's own long-running design thread. The source-tier design question has weighed fusing versus splitting the reliability and credibility axes, later joined by Icard's asymmetric-update shape. Samet adds a dimension none of those consider: granularity per axis, a design question distinct from the axes-can't-be-held-apart finding, with the lineage behind it traced in observation-admiralty-code-scale-length-descends-from-millers-channel-capacity. But the complaint from inside intelligence tradecraft was not "too few rungs" instead of "too many axes" — it was both at once, and Samet's prescription joined them: one axis, finely graduated. That makes him a practitioner-side primary arguing for the merge, which bears directly on the search that found no practitioner advocating it.

2026-08-18 addendum: Kelly et al. (2025) cite Samet directly, in their own §2, for this same non-independence evidence — but their discussion's forward pointer (Icard's richer joint matrix, claim-kelly-et-al-propose-richer-joint-matrix-not-axis-collapse) runs the opposite structural direction from Samet's own axis-fusion prescription. Bridge-check detailed in observation-kelly-samet-cosine-pairing-real-link-opposite-axis-prescription.