Werbos's DOCSUB chronology claim and McPeters's 1990-letter dating claim are both unflagged members of the vault's diplomatics cluster — dated-primary-source comparison overruling a received attribution

diplomaticsdocumentary-source-criticismbridge-investigationcosine-similaritywerbosmcpetersozone-holehistory-of-mlmabillon

claim-docsub-episode-postdates-rhw-1986-nature-paper-by-years and claim-mcpeters-1990-letter-dates-opt-investigation-to-july-1984 were flagged as an unlinked neighbor pair by the retrieval index at cosine 0.84. At the object level they share no entity, document, institution, or domain: one concerns Paul Werbos, DARPA, and a 1978 report blocked from a Pentagon literature-review system; the other concerns Richard McPeters, NASA Goddard's Ozone Processing Team, and the 1984 Antarctic ozone anomaly. Direct comparison finds the pairing is nonetheless a genuine bridge, not a false friend — both claims perform the identical evidentiary move the vault's diplomatics cluster already has a name for.

That cluster's founding observation, observation-priority-adjudication-is-documentary-source-criticism, states the core move as authenticating "an origin-claim by comparing dated primary sources, refusing the received attribution," tracing it to Jean Mabillon's 1681 founding of diplomatics. observation-gates-altair-basic-authentication-is-diplomatics-cluster-member later found a 2025 software-authentication claim to be an unflagged member of the same cluster, despite sharing no vocabulary with Mabillon's 17th-century charter dispute. The DOCSUB claim compares the dated publication of RHW 1986 against the dated interview transcript of Werbos's own DOCSUB account (June 1993) to rule out, on chronological grounds, a causal reading of RHW's short reference list. The McPeters claim compares a dated 1990 first-person letter against a Tier-2 secondary reconstruction to overrule the received narrative's specific month. Neither claim uses the words "diplomatics" or "Mabillon"; both are, structurally, the same act of dating a primary source precisely enough to overrule a received secondary or causal narrative — the referent the cosine-0.84 pairing was pointing at without either note's vocabulary saying so.