The Objection, Which Is About Selection Rather Than Data

Nobody disputes the network or the archive. The dispute concerns the step between them and the conclusion, and it is a clean example of a problem that recurs across this whole field. Three decisions have to be made for each entry in the analysis: whether an event counts as globally attended, when the window of interest starts and stops, and which statistic to compute over it. All three are made by people who have access to the data. With a long enough archive, a large enough space of candidate events and freedom over window boundaries, a body of data with no structure at all will yield a set of apparently significant windows, and no amount of subsequent arithmetic can distinguish that from a real effect. The project maintains that its event registry is fixed before the data are examined in each case.

Critics reply that this cannot be verified from outside and that the historical event list has grown by criteria that were not published in advance. The test that would settle it is straightforward in principle: an independent party defines a list of events and windows prospectively, hands it over, and the analysis runs once. That has not been done, and until it is, the central objection stands unanswered rather than refuted.