October 2008: the GodIndex low and the danger of a missing minus

The original wording resolves an ambiguity

The 15 October post described the index as reaching a low of −1.8. In that source, −1.8 is an index level, not a decline of 1.8 points. The distinction matters whenever a summary compresses a historical article into a single number.

A separate homepage capture on 25 October displayed −3.36287. The two figures are not competing values for the same instant: the article and capture are dated differently. Neither observation establishes the full path between them.

A later low is not a complete daily sequence

The recovered displays document a markedly negative period. They do not reveal how many intervening days rose, how quickly the low was reached, or whether an even lower value occurred outside our capture set. The plotted collection therefore leaves those intervals blank.

Calling the lowest recovered display an “all-time low” would require a more complete archive than we currently have. We use the narrower and verifiable description: lowest displayed close in this recovered collection.

What survives of the explanation

The article connected the decline with the crisis and quoted emotional comments from participants. Such examples communicate how some people expressed themselves, but selected comments do not measure how common an explanation was across all voters.

A future analysis could code comments under a published protocol and report how many responses were included, excluded or ambiguous. That would turn illustrative quotations into a defined analysis. For now, the post remains evidence of the project’s own crisis narrative.

Inspect the source-linked observations and the earlier September article.