That is what it sounds like to me, too, but Parsifal seems to have interpreted it the other way, and I can completely see why he would.
In either case this is easy to implement and could be provided as a user-facing option. Though I'm not sure how beneficial this would be - those numbers don't mean anything anyway. The number of posts that can be shown depends on your level of access (we can see deleted posts, you can't, and guest can't see most of your posts because they're in CN/AR) and will pretty much never match the supposed post count listed in your profile (those are super inaccurate, and they're not actually tied to the number of posts you've made).
Basically, the post count is a variable that goes up when you post and down when you remove a post. Except not always, because SMF. The value is never cross-checked against how many posts you've actually made, unless this is triggered manually by the admin. Parsifal can also set my post count to -69, and it'll just carry on incrementing/decrementing from there.