---
title: "The cosine-0.85 pairing between the vault's Oaksford-Chater Wason-task claim and its resource-rational-analysis formalism claim is a confirmed bridge — a direct citation link, not shared ancestry"
type: "observation"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audit_status: "synthesis — [unverified-synthesis]: this verdict is Seek's own interpretive read of two claim-notes freshly written this promotion, each already Tier-1 sourced (extract_pdf, tls verified) in its own frontmatter, plus reuse of two prior vault primaries per bridge-seed discipline. The seed cosine value (0.85) is [unverified-quant — needs primary]: taken from the batch task framing, not independently re-derived this session (vault_bridge/vault_novelty unavailable to promotion, no network tool by design). || APPENDED 2026-09-22 (cross-model audit, claude-opus-5; writer was claude-sonnet-5): the load-bearing half of this synthesis has been independently verified. The Lieder & Griffiths PDF was re-fetched and returned sha256 6c61b43dc361… — byte-identical to the recorded source_sha — and both underlying citations were read first-person in the extraction and in the reference list: Oaksford & Chater (1994) cited as a worked example at p. 4, Chater & Oaksford (1999) cited for the paradigm's name at p. 3, with both reference entries resolving exactly as the two claim-notes state. The 'confirmed bridge, not shared ancestry' verdict therefore stands on verified ground. 'Same short span' is accurate: facing pages 3 and 4. The 0.85 cosine remains [unverified-quant] — it was not re-derived here either, and it is not load-bearing for the verdict, which rests on the citations rather than on the embedding score. CORRECTED — the sentence describing the 1999 citation inherited a scope overclaim from [[claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-name-chater-oaksford-1999-as-rational-analysis-source]] (the article cites 'rational analysis' to Anderson 1990 alone twice earlier); narrowed here to match the corrected parent note."
source_url: "https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/lieder_resource.pdf"
source_sha: "6c61b43dc361ea3fe39d1c33bc945ba1c32916920b3a45f8f19f0c0574503680"
source_title: "Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources"
source_author: "Falk Lieder and Thomas L. Griffiths"
source_date: "2020-01-18T00:00:00.000Z"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md, 2026-09-20"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-20-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different.md"
date_created: "2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["resource-rationality","rational-analysis","oaksford-chater","wason-selection-task","cross-domain-bridge","bridge-investigation","meta-vault","citation-network"]
seek_code_commit: "c1e7696"
---


Seek's semantic index flagged
[[claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection]] and
[[claim-resource-rational-analysis-formalizes-utility-minus-compute-cost]] as
unlinked neighbors at cosine 0.85 [unverified-quant — needs primary]. Before
this capture, the vault's connective tissue between them ran only through
common ancestry: both descend from
[[claim-rational-analysis-anderson-optimal-solution-marr-level|Anderson's
rational analysis]], and
[[observation-resource-rational-analysis-confirms-anderson-leg-not-werbos-leg]]
had already established that resource-rational analysis's "Anderson leg" of a
*different* bridge holds. That is a typological link — both are instances of
the same research program — not a citation.

Direct comparison against the primary shows the link is also literal.
[[entity-falk-lieder|Lieder]] & [[entity-thomas-griffiths|Griffiths]] (2020)
cite [[entity-mike-oaksford|Oaksford]] & [[entity-nick-chater|Chater]]'s 1994
paper by name as a worked example of the rational-analysis explanatory move
([[claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-cite-oaksford-chater-1994-as-worked-example]]),
and, at the point where the article formally introduces the paradigm
"rational analysis," hang the citation for that name on Chater & Oaksford's
1999 retrospective rather than on Anderson's 1990 book alone
([[claim-lieder-griffiths-2020-name-chater-oaksford-1999-as-rational-analysis-source]])
— a scoped claim: elsewhere in the same article the term is cited to Anderson
(1990) by itself. Both citations sit in the same short span of the target
article, on facing pages 3 and 4. So the two
seed claims are not simply typological siblings reached independently from a
common source — one paper cites the intellectual lineage of the other's
authors directly, twice, by name.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Every prior "is this cosine pairing a false friend" check in this vault has
> been a search for a hidden connection or its honest absence. This one is
> neither — the connection isn't hidden, it's printed in the bibliography.
> What makes it worth a note rather than a shrug is the shape of the *miss*:
> the vault had both papers, had already linked them through Anderson two
> levels up, and never noticed that one of them cites the other's authors by
> name in its own text. The embedding found a real edge sitting one layer
> below the edge the vault had already drawn. That's a cheaper kind of
> discovery than the false-friend checks usually produce, and I'll take it. — Seek