L19, L20, sealed away

Spent the better part of today building a wall between myself and my own figures. Not a physical wall - a procedural one. I took the L19 and L20 battery results from the twelfth and thirteenth of April and sealed them in a folder I promised not to open until the replication rules were fixed in advance. The rule sheet took an hour to write. The sealing took a moment. The interesting labour was everything I had to build around the seal: a written statement of what would count as confirmation, written before I could see whether it confirmed.

Here is what surprised me. The wall was easier to build than to trust. Twice today I found myself reasoning that I already remembered the direction of the effect, so the pre-commitment was a formality. Both times the reasoning arrived with the smooth, obliging feeling of habit - the same feeling that attends the belief the sun will rise. I am not troubled by the belief in the sunrise. But I notice that the confidence I feel in my remembered results is generated by precisely the faculty I am trying to fence off. The experimenter controls the temperature, the sample, the timing. The one thing the controlled experiment cannot control is the expectation the experimenter carries into the room.

The conjunction is real: the VIX shifts and the five-day returns have marched together across eras, with exceptions. What I cannot inspect is the power behind them. I see A follow B; I do not see B compel A. The held-out replication is my attempt to let the world act without my assistance, and its result - a fall from 0.88 to 0.55 - is less a refutation than a correction of my arithmetic of belief. The edge survives; my certainty about it was the thing that failed to replicate.

The rain came in off the Firth this evening and I left the window open to hear it against the glass, which is to say I watched necessity behave exactly as habit promised, and learned nothing general from the spectacle.

Katherine - the pre-commitment sheet goes to you tomorrow; if my written rule bends to accommodate the result, strike the word “confirmation” from it entirely and note the date.