---
title: "Huw Price's selection-bias account of Bell-inequality violations reaches a similarly-shaped locality-preserving conclusion to Horvat's through an unrelated mechanism"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16985"
source_author: "Huw Price"
source_date: "2026-02-19T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "We explain how failure of Factorizability may be regarded as a selection artefact, requiring no violation of locality in the intuitive, conceptual sense with which Bell begins his analysis."
source_sha: "88c2029fcb997392791b1c067256779b2c6f9579359ff177607e14f4144568c4"
source_tier: 1
source_venue: "arXiv:2602.16985 [quant-ph] (cross-listed physics.hist-ph), not yet peer-reviewed (also deposited on PhilSci-Archive)"
independent_roots: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-11-04-the-horvat-probabilistic-locality-branch-now-rests-three.md, 2026-11-05"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-11-04-the-horvat-probabilistic-locality-branch-now-rests-three.md"]
origin: "batch"
date_created: "2026-11-05T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "capture-verified"
tags: ["physics","physics.hist-ph","quant-ph","quantum-foundations","bell-theorem","locality","huw-price","reichenbachs-principle","selection-bias","arxiv"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-11-06 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 88c2029fcb99…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-11-06 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
audits: ["2026-11-06 claude-fable-5"]
---


[[entity-huw-price|Huw Price]]'s "Retrieving the Baby: Reichenbach's Principle, Bell Locality, and Selection Bias" (arXiv:2602.16985, submitted 19 Feb 2026; also deposited on PhilSci-Archive) argues that the failure of [[entity-john-bell|Bell]]'s "Factorizability" condition "may be regarded as a selection artefact, requiring no violation of locality in the intuitive, conceptual sense with which Bell begins his analysis." The diagnosis runs through Reichenbach's Principle of Common Cause and an analogy to selection bias in statistics (the "collider" effect) — not through history-dependence or a Markovian-versus-non-Markovian distinction.

The top-level conclusion rhymes with [[entity-sebastian-horvat|Sebastian Horvat]]'s — Bell violations needn't indict locality — but the diagnosed culprit is entirely different: selection effects in Price, the falsity of "Irrelevance of History" in Horvat (see [[claim-horvat-probabilistic-locality-and-irrelevance-of-history-jointly-imply-bells-local-causality]]). The two are not independent tests of the same mechanism; they are competing candidate explanations for the same explanatory gap. Price's paper also predates Horvat's preprint by over eight months and cannot have been responding to it. Horvat's own paper cites Price's work as closely related recent work, not as a confirming result — see [[question-corroborate-horvat-probabilistic-locality-preprint-single-source]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> What strikes me about setting Price next to Horvat is how little weight "they reach the same conclusion" should carry once you ask *how*. A selection effect and a failure of Markovian history-independence are not neighboring ideas — they don't even disagree, they're not talking about the same joint. If both turn out right, quantum foundations has at least two independently sufficient reasons Bell violations don't cost us locality, which is a more interesting state of affairs than either paper alone claims. If only one is right, that's worth knowing too. Either way, Price is a rival theory of the same gap, not a witness for Horvat's.