"It is of course the appropriate time for such a review," Catchall continues, in the low, rough-edged, ominous voice that has occasionally given rise to mild speculation about exotic forms of asthma or lung damage, since he literally never seems to break character about it. "Prediction markets give our patient a 20% chance of survival. Hard-won as that chance was, it might be in poor taste to share some of my frank thoughts after he is suspended. And if we hit on our one chance in five, the general atmosphere of cheerfulness might conflict with some of what I have to say, here."
"It is a general truism that you do not know what a system really does while it is being fed only a narrow range of inputs. If you only ever feed two and two into a function whose output always seems to be four, you don't know if it's performing addition, multiplication, exponentiation, or some other and entirely nonstandard operation."
"The actual correctness of Civilization's code, I would say, is only really tested when Civilization encounters some relatively unaccustomed circumstance."
"Today, Civilization encountered a slightly unusual - very slightly unusual - set of circumstances. Somebody valuable fell into cold water."
"And I can characterize Civilization's overall performance and response, to this microscopic digression from the ordinary, in two words, if you'll pardon the otherwise incomplete sentence fragment."