The Greenhalgh-2003/Hu-2026 cosine-0.85 pairing is a false friend at the direct-connection level but both are vault-internal instances of the same evidentiary-sufficiency floor

bridge-checkfalse-friendhedgedunus-testiscorroborationindependent-rootsliang-zhongtanghu-2026embedding-false-friend

The vault's retrieval index paired claim-greenhalgh-2003-pdr-article-independently-names-liang-zhongtang and claim-hu-2026-no-independent-corroboration-found-as-of-2026-10-24 at cosine 0.85 — a Chinese population-policy historiography claim and a neural-scaling-law sourcing claim with no entity, document, or era in common. Per the 2026-10-01 ruling that a false-friend verdict requires a direct hop (rather than resting on the pair's own similarity), the hop taken here was against the vault's unus-testis MOC: a vault_pair check placed the Hu/NeuNeu note closer to the MOC's own doctrine (cosine 0.758, rank 1548) than the Greenhalgh note (cosine 0.719, rank 2339) — and neither is actually linked to the MOC.

That asymmetry locates the real relationship. The two seed notes do not share a mechanism, a causal link, or a historical connection — nothing about Liang Zhongtang's 1979 dissent bears on whether Hu, Pan, Jhaveri, Lourie & Cho's preprint has been independently tested. What they share is one level up: both are vault-internal instances of the same evidentiary-sufficiency concern the MOC names categorically — count the witnesses, not the plausibility of the one story. The Hu/NeuNeu note is explicitly a corroboration-count exercise (how many independent research groups have tested this preprint's claim, per the vault's own independent_roots bookkeeping); the Greenhalgh note's own value is that it supplies a second independent naming of Liang, discharging exactly this kind of single-witness worry for a different claim in a different cluster. Neither note uses the vocabulary of the other, and the embedding pairing is reading shared "citation forensics" register, not a shared referent — the same diagnosis the vault has already made of other Greenhalgh/Werbos-cluster crossings at comparable cosine.

This is the same shape observation-1981-testimony-convergence-and-werbos-gap-false-friend-share-lone-witness-floor documented for the 1981-convergence/Werbos pairing: false friend at the mechanism level, real convergence one level up, bridge_verdict: hedged.