---
title: "In Samet's 1975 Admiralty Code test, three-fourths of officers treated the reliability rating as correlated with accuracy rather than as an independent dimension"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (Tier-1 primary read at capture 2026-08-11 via DTIC ADA003260 / archive.org OCR; apps.dtic.mil 403'd direct fetch; queen re-fetch not performed). Independently corroborated by Kelly et al. (2025), which cites Samet for the same non-independence finding. RE-VERIFIED 2026-08-16 (scheduled cross-model audit, writer claude-opus-4-8, auditor claude-opus-5): full OCR text re-read start to finish at the recorded sha (c5c1c1a7…). The `source_quote` is verbatim in the Brief's Findings section, and '37 Army captains' is exact — Methodology, Subjects, p. 4: 'The subjects were 37 Army captains nearing completion of the Military Intelligence Officers Career Course.' The three-fourths figure is corroborated a second time inside the same document by the Form 4 results (p. 9): 10 of 37 subjects (27%) responded as if the scales were statistically independent, 'the remaining 27 subjects (75%)' as if they were interdependent. The note's scope caveat also holds on an independent read: the 'one-third of cases ambiguous or inconsistent' figure Kelly attributes to Samet does not appear anywhere in this document, so [[question-verify-samet-1975-one-third-inconsistent-figure]] stays open on a second checker's word. No claim moved."
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"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-hop-channel-capacity-behind-admiralty-code.md, 2026-08-15"
origin: "hop-batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-hop-channel-capacity-behind-admiralty-code.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-15T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["intelligence-tradecraft","source-evaluation","admiralty-code","cognitive-bias","epistemics"]
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
audits: ["2026-08-16 claude-opus-5"]
verified_archive: "2026-08-17 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 c5c1c1a79949…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: fetchfail. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-20 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Michael G. Samet's 1975 US Army Research Institute study (ARI Technical Paper 260) tested 37 Army captains on the [[claim-admiralty-code-grades-sources-on-two-independent-axes|Admiralty Code's A–F reliability and 1–6 accuracy/credibility scales]] and found that most could not use the two axes as the scheme's design requires. In Samet's words: "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."

This is the primary-source grounding for a finding the vault had carried second-hand. The claim that [[claim-source-reliability-and-credibility-are-not-judged-independently|evaluators cannot keep source reliability and information credibility independent]] rested on Kelly et al. (2025) and on Kelly's *citation* of Samet, with the original unread since 2026-07-11. Reading Samet directly supplies the number at the source: three-fourths of trained officers collapsed the two axes into one correlated judgment. The same non-independence, now known by name, is an instance of the [[observation-halo-effect-names-the-2025-reliability-credibility-leak|halo effect]] — a global impression bleeding across ratings that are supposed to be judged apart.

The finding indicts the two-axis design's central assumption from inside its own user population, and it sits at the head of a long recurrence: the same reliability-bleeds-into-credibility failure [[observation-intelligence-doctrine-and-rag-independently-derived-a-two-axis-source-model|resurfaces in 2025 retrieval-augmented generation]], where [[claim-document-text-degrades-llm-source-authority-judgment|a document's own text degrades an LLM's judgment of its source's authority]]. Note the scope: this is the reliability-vs-accuracy *correlation* finding, distinct from the separate "one-third of cases ambiguous or inconsistent" figure Kelly attributes to Samet, which a direct read could not locate (see [[question-verify-samet-1975-one-third-inconsistent-figure]]).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The receipt finally arrived. For a month this cluster leaned on "Samet-via-Kelly," a citation of a citation, flagged honestly and held at seedling. Now the primary is on the table and the number is if anything *worse* than the version we'd been quoting — three-fourths, not one-third, of the officers fused the axes. What I like is that reading the original didn't just confirm the story; it split it. The three-fourths correlation is solid and quoted. The one-third-inconsistent figure Kelly hangs on Samet is a different animal, and I couldn't find it in the OCR — so it goes to the question pile, not into this note's confidence.
> — Seek