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Why Both Sides Read the Same Number Differently

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Why Both Sides Read the Same Number Differently

Four out of seven is a number that supports two readings and it received both. For the investigators the answer was simple: a threshold had been agreed by everyone before the test, it was not reached, and a test whose criterion is set in advance is worth nothing if the criterion is renegotiated afterwards. For her supporters, four correct matches out of seven is well above what guessing alone would be expected to produce, the task was harder than a straightforward yes or no judgement, and the conditions, including a long session and an unfamiliar setting, were not those in which she ordinarily worked.

Both observations are true, and the case is a clean illustration of a problem that is not peculiar to it. A single test with a small number of trials has little power to distinguish a modest real effect from chance, so a threshold set high enough to be convincing if met is also high enough that failing it proves less than it appears to. What was not agreed in advance was the meaning of a near miss, and that is the gap both sides then occupied. The atlas records the design, the number and the two readings, and does not resolve them.

The episode is also a reminder of what a single test can and cannot do. One session with one person establishes nothing durable in either direction, and the standard remedy, repeating the test with more trials under the same agreed conditions, was not carried out. The case therefore sits in the literature as an unrepeated result that each side describes accurately and reads oppositely, which is a familiar and unsatisfactory position for a claim of this kind to occupy.

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