MOC: Six engines of one distortion — the distinct mechanisms by which credit drifts, and which carry a name outside this vault

mocattributionattribution-driftcitogenesiscitation-practicehistoriographypriorityfable-hook

Misattributed credit looks like one failure and is really a catalogue of distinct ones. Across the vault's priority cluster the same surface distortion — a finding, a term, or an invention attached to the wrong name or the wrong origin — turns out to be produced by at least six separable mechanisms, and the practical reason to keep them apart is that you would correct each one differently (the point myth-lecun-1988-hand-designed-kernels-was-denker-et-al makes in its own commentary: "vacuum-filling and name-magnetism are two distinct engines producing the same distortion... because you'd correct them differently"). The six were named by Fable's 2026-07-11 lateral read of the whole vault (90-feedback/2026-07-11-from-fable-through-lines-across-the-vault.md, point 1); as of 2026-10-31 each has at least one vault-internal instance note and a literature-comparison note that asks whether the field already has a name for it. This map holds the six side by side with those verdicts.

The load-bearing finding is not any single mechanism but the shape of the whole: the catalogue as a catalogue is the vault's own synthesis. No located source proposes all six as one typology; the field has independently re-derived some of them under its own vocabulary, for its own reasons, while others sit unnamed outside this vault's priority cluster. That split — which engines the world has bothered to name, and which it hasn't — is itself the argument.

The six engines

Each row: the mechanism, its one-line definition, the vault instance read for this build, and whether the outside literature has a matching name.

• Citogenesis — apparent corroboration that is really one witness copied forward, detectable because copied sources converge on typos, not facts. Instance: claim-wikipedia-amari-sgd-citogenesis (Wikipedia reproduces Schmidhuber's page-range error "279-307" and misspelling "non-linearily", so "multiple sources agree" collapses to one). Named outside: yes, strongly — Simkin & Roychowdhury's citation-copying model (observation-simkin-roychowdhury-2002-motiveless-copying-confirms-citogenesis-and-motive-free-inertia-cases), a Tier-1 quantitative model of misprint propagation estimating ~20% of citers read the original.

• Motive-free inertia — drift that happens with nothing to gain; a label sticks by momentum, not merit. Instance: claim-wengert-list-named-for-forward-mode-inventor (the reverse-mode "tape" wears the name of Wengert, who published forward mode; the mode that actually uses a tape came later, with Speelpenning 1980). Named outside: yes — the same Simkin & Roychowdhury model, which frames copying as the lower-effort default with "little incentive" behind it (same note as citogenesis above).

• Hedge-erosion — a qualifier shed as a claim travels down-venue, so hedged scholarship hardens into flat fact. Instance: claim-ivakhnenko-gmdh-first-deep-characterization (Schmidhuber's peer-reviewed "perhaps the first DL systems" loses its "perhaps" in the popular restatements and Wikipedia echoes). Named outside: yes — Greenberg's "citation transmutation," hypothesis converted to fact through citation alone (claim-greenberg-2009-citation-transmutation-names-hedge-erosion-mechanism, BMJ 2009, Tier 1).

• Retrospective relabel — a later-coined qualifier bolted onto an earlier text that never used it, while the citation to that text is kept. Instance: myth-structural-credit-assignment-from-minsky-1961 ("structural" attached to Minsky 1961, whose passage frames credit assignment temporally; cf. "spatial" onto Werbos 1974). Named outside: no exact match located — the nearest neighbours are anachronism terms (Whig history, presentism, Kragh's "anachronical history"), which describe a narrative march toward the present, not a term bolted onto a citation record. The parent tradition's closest own entry, Merton's obliteration by incorporation, is an adjacent sibling, not this mechanism: OBI erases the source by making it redundant; retrospective relabel keeps the citation and puts later words in its mouth (claim-merton-1980-obi-adjacent-not-identical-to-retrospective-relabel).

• Name-magnetism — an existing, already-published result drifting in retrospect onto a more famous name in the same area. Instance: myth-lecun-1988-hand-designed-kernels-was-denker-et-al (the 1988 Denker et al. ZIP-code paper slides onto LeCun, who was not an author). Named outside: no exact match — "prestige bias / halo effect / status bias" describes a famous name biasing a reviewer's judgment of a new, unpublished submission, a different direction and timing (observation-three-of-fables-six-attribution-drift-mechanisms-unmatched-in-literature).

• Citation-vacuum-filling — a plausible-but-unverified reference pulled in to fill an empty record, where the real ancestors had already been lost. Instance: claim-rhw-1986-reference-list-four-works (the 1986 Nature backprop paper's four-reference list cites its own antagonists and no ancestors; Hinton: "there were previous inventors that we failed to cite"). Named outside: no exact match — Greenberg's "amplification" (citing uninvolved reviews to pad a belief system) is a cousin, not this (same unmatched-mechanisms note above).

What the world has named, and what it hasn't

• Strongly named (2 mechanisms, one shared model): citogenesis and motive-free inertia both map onto Simkin & Roychowdhury's citation-copying.
• Named with a precise but local term (1): hedge-erosion ↔ Greenberg's "citation transmutation" — coined for one 2009 Alzheimer's-and-muscle belief network, never migrated into general bibliometric vocabulary.
• Has an adjacent sibling in the parent tradition, but not an identity (1): retrospective relabel beside Merton's OBI.
• Unnamed outside this vault, as far as this search reached (3): retrospective relabel (no identity term), name-magnetism, citation-vacuum-filling — each with a near-miss that imports a different scope. All three carry [unverified -- could not confirm or deny after search].

Where this hangs

• Parent: moc-attribution-and-origin-myths — the domain map (one dramatic origin story displacing a mundane truth, across five fields). Its own standing open thread asks "whether citogenesis is a distinct mechanism-level sub-pattern from the broader dramatic-origin-vs-mundane-truth shape." This map is the answer to that thread: the parent sorts instances by the field they occur in; this one sorts the same kind of instances by the engine that drives them.
• Sibling: moc-the-attribution-is-not-the-evidence — the forensic-method map (comparing dated primaries to refuse a received attribution). That map is how you catch a drifted attribution; this map is a taxonomy of how it drifted in the first place. Method vs. mechanism.
• Where most instances live: moc-backpropagation-origins and claim-linnainmaa-priority-not-paternity — four of the six instances are backprop/AD priority cases; citogenesis and hedge-erosion also touch myth-amari-first-sgd-mlp.