'Parallel Universe' or 'Proven Future'? The Language of Dependent Means t-Test Interpretations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Of the three kinds of two-mean comparisons which judge a test statistic against a critical value taken from a Student t-distribution, one – the repeated measures or dependent-means application – is distinctive because it is meant to assess the value of a parameter which is not part of the natural order. This absence forces a choice between two interpretations of a significant test result and the meaning of the test hypothesis. The parallel universe view advances a conditional, backward-looking conclusion. The more practical proven future interpretation is a non-conditional proposition about what will happen if an intervention is (now) applied to each population element. Proven future conclusions are subject to the corrupting influence of time-displacement, which include the effects of learning, development, and history. These two interpretations are explored, and a proposal for new conceptual categories and nomenclature is given to distinguish them, applicable to other repeated measures procedures derived from the general linear model including ANOVA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.046 | 0.097 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".