The Discipline of Not Fooling Ourselves: Episode 6 — The Mirage of Maturity

How "being mature" becomes an identity rather than a property. Where We Stand By Episode 5, the system had lost something specific: the ability to follow evidence toward explanations it was not already prepared to accept. The evidence remained. The explanatory function had quietly been replaced by a confirmatory one. The system was fully documented and progressively less understood. What happens next follows with a logic that is almost mechanical. A system that can no longer test its own underst