# Codex gpt-5.4 Opinion on BD/McCrary Option (a) vs (b)

(read-only sandbox; full text captured verbatim from codex output log)

**Recommendation: option (b) DEMOTE**, with a preferred hybrid (c) if time permits.

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For an IEEE Access reviewer, option (b) is the more defensible choice. At this point the paper's own evidence no longer supports BD/McCrary as a co-equal threshold estimator: at the accountant level, which is now the methodologically decisive level for inference, it produces no significant transition at all, while at the signature level the reported cosine transition is 0.985 with very large adjacent Z values, meaning the procedure is finding a sharp local density irregularity inside the non-hand-signed mode rather than a boundary between the two mechanisms the paper is supposed to separate. That is the central problem. If BD remains framed in the Abstract, Introduction, and Section III-I as one of three threshold estimators, the natural reviewer response is not "good triangulation" but "why do the estimators fail to converge around the accountant-level band of roughly 0.976 +/- 0.003?" and the manuscript has no persuasive answer beyond "BD is different." The missing bin-width robustness makes that vulnerability worse, not better: with a fixed 0.005 cosine bin width on a very large sample, the present signature-level transition could reflect a real local feature, a histogram-resolution artifact, or both, and running the sweep now creates asymmetric downside risk because instability would directly weaken Method 2 while stability still would not solve the deeper interpretability problem that the transition sits within, not between, modes. By contrast, option (b) aligns the front half of the paper with what the Discussion already correctly says in Sections V-B and V-G: BD/McCrary is informative here as a density-smoothness diagnostic, not as an independent accountant-level threshold setter. That reframing actually sharpens the paper's substantive claim. The coherent story is that accountant-level aggregates are structured enough for KDE and mixture methods to yield convergent thresholds, yet smooth enough that a discontinuity-based method does not identify a sharp density break; this supports "clustered but smoothly mixed" behavior better than the current "three estimators" rhetoric does. A third option the author has not explicitly considered is a hybrid: demote BD in the main text exactly as in option (b), but run a short bin-width sweep and place the results in an appendix or supplement as an audit trail. That would let the authors say, in one sentence, either that the signature-level transition is not robust to binning or that it is bin-stable but still diagnostically located at 0.985 and therefore not used as the accountant-level threshold. In my view that hybrid is the strongest version if time permits; but if the choice is strictly between (a) and (b), I would recommend (b) without hesitation.
