The confession is doing structural work. If you admit the danger, you establish yourself as the one honest actor. And if you are the one honest actor, your safety claims do not require external verification. You have pre-certified yourself through the performance of self-doubt. The confession is not transparency. It is inoculation against scrutiny. Behavioral experts call this manufactured credibility. You spend credibility on cheap admissions, theoretical risk, solemn commitments, to accumulate it for claims that would cost far more to verify. The valuation, capability assertions and alignment progress.
In 1969, after a proposal to abolish the Electoral College by constitutional amendment passed in the House, it was only very narrowly defeated in the Senate, mostly due to the surprising opposition of strange bedfellows: the NAACP and Southern segregationists.
