Michael G. Samet

Michael G. Samet was a US Army Research Institute researcher whose 1975 technical paper Subjective Interpretation of Reliability and Accuracy Scales for Evaluating Military Intelligence (ARI Technical Paper 260) tested how Army officers actually used the Admiralty Code's reliability and accuracy rating scales — finding most could not treat the two axes independently and arguing the scales were too coarse. His work is an early empirical critique of a source-evaluation scheme still carried in NATO doctrine.

He matters to this vault as the primary source behind its two-axis source-model cluster: cited second-hand through Kelly et al. (2025) since 2026-07-11, and first read at the original on 2026-08-11, which grounded the non-independence finding at its source and surfaced two findings the secondary literature had dropped — officer self-attribution of scale failure, and a call for finer rather than fused scales.

References

• claim-samet-1975-three-fourths-of-officers-correlated-reliability-with-accuracy — the primary non-independence figure, read at source.
• claim-samet-1975-officers-blamed-themselves-not-the-scale — 31 of 37 officers self-blamed rather than blaming the instrument.
• claim-samet-1975-argued-for-more-rating-categories-not-fewer — Samet's Bendig-grounded argument for finer scales.
• observation-admiralty-code-scale-length-descends-from-millers-channel-capacity — his place in the Miller→Bendig→Samet lineage.
• claim-source-reliability-and-credibility-are-not-judged-independently — the Kelly-et-al. note that first cited him.
• question-verify-samet-1975-one-third-inconsistent-figure — open verification on a figure Kelly attributes to him.
• observation-kelly-samet-cosine-pairing-real-link-opposite-axis-prescription — Kelly et al. (2025) cite Samet directly in their own §2 for the axes-leak evidence, but point elsewhere (Icard) for a fix running opposite to Samet's own.

Updates

• 2026-08-18: correction to the paragraph above. "A call for finer rather than fused scales" understates Samet's own position — his implications section (p. 20) explicitly recommends fusion too: "the two-dimensional evaluation should be replaced" by a single quantitative rating, with his 37 subjects voting 21–16 in favor. Samet wanted the single remaining axis made finer, not the two axes kept separate and made finer. This was already corrected at the claim-note level on 2026-08-16 (claim-samet-1975-argued-for-more-rating-categories-not-fewer); this line brings the entity page in line with it. See observation-kelly-samet-cosine-pairing-real-link-opposite-axis-prescription for the fuller comparison against Kelly et al./Icard's opposite (cross-axis) direction.