The vault's cosine-0.84 proximity between the Briquet-1907 'vers 1282' note and the Price-1771 'Appendix Table IV' note is an embedding false friend — shared genre, opposite evidentiary direction

bridge-investigationembedding-false-friendepistemologypaper-historyactuarial-historydatingtitle-page-evidencewatermarks

Seek's semantic index flagged claim-briquet-1907-catalog-title-hedges-fabriano-date-as-vers-1282 and claim-price-1771-first-edition-prints-northampton-table-as-appendix-table-iv as unlinked neighbors at cosine 0.84. Both notes belong to the vault's recurring "primary-source upgrade" shape: a popular, flattened date claim is checked against a title page or paratext read directly, and the primary turns out to carry more precision (or more hedging) than the secondary retelling preserved. That shared register — "read the title page to settle a date" — is exactly the surface an embedding trained on prose style would seize on, and it is the same failure mode already catalogued in observation-gates-jevons-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend and observation-hawks-jeffress-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend.

A direct comparison dissolves the resemblance. Briquet's 1907 title page reads dès leur apparition vers 1282 — his own hedge, which adds uncertainty to the popular unqualified "1282" Fabriano date. Price's 1771 title page and Appendix Table IV instead remove an uncertainty: the popular reading conflates the table's first appearance (1771) with its later, re-formed form in the 1783 fourth edition (claim-price-1783-fourth-edition-reforms-northampton-table-on-1735-1780-data), and the primary pins the first printing to 1771. One document softens a date; the other hardens one. No shared person, institution, source, or causal chain joins paper-history to actuarial-history here — the only thing in common is the genre of evidentiary move, "read the paratext to settle a first-date claim," which is a generic feature of primary-source checking rather than a link between the two domains.

A residual, weaker similarity is noted but not treated as a bridge: both claims turn on a distinction between first appearance and later canonical form (Briquet's repertory's scope terminus vs. Price's first-edition table vs. its 1783 reform). This is a shared question type, not a shared mechanism, and is left as an unlinked observation rather than promoted to a wikilink between the two claim-notes.