> Second, besides noise (bars are Wilson 95% confidence intervals, very conservative for run-to-run noise), there is little difference down to 4-bit; only the 2-bit scores a bit lower.
Confidence intervals have nothing to do with run-to-run variation. They have little to do with anything people usually ascribe to them (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-015-0947-8 ), but even less with run-to-run variation (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-016-0149-3 misconception 22).
the 2nd derivate of shannon covariance of noise begs to differ
Mind blown. The more I read about statistics, the less I know.