If the king is too gullible, the vassals have an economic incentive to abuse this through the various methods you described. This eventually leads to a permanent distortion of the truth. If an economic crisis hits the country, his lack of truthful information would prevent him to solve it. The crises would exacerbate, which, at some point, would propel the population to rebel and topple him. As a replacement, a less gullible king would be put into power. This looks like a control loop to me—one that gets rid of too gullible kings.
So, my strategy as detective would be to wait until the situation gets worse and stage a coup.
I want to argue that a healthy dose of artificial optimism can be useful (by the way, isn’t all optimism artificial? Otherwise, we would call it realism). This can be on a personal level: If you expect to have a good day, you are more likely to do things that will make your day good. Or, in your scenario, if a vassal whose region isn’t going great starts to praise it and gets more resources this way, he can invest them into rebuilding it (although I question the policy of assigning more resources to those regions that are faring well anyway).
As a side note, this reminds me of the Great Leap Forward under Mao, which caused millions of death by starvation. The main reason was deceitful reporting: as the information about crops needed to be collected at the central authority and it had to go through multiple levels (farmers themselves, districts, cities, counties, states) and at each level, the representatives exaggerated the numbers slightly, this added up and eventually led the top party officials to believe that everything was going great when millions were dying. (Of course, this is a hierarchical structure of vassals, but it’s still artificial optimism)
If the king is too gullible, the vassals have an economic incentive to abuse this through the various methods you described. This eventually leads to a permanent distortion of the truth. If an economic crisis hits the country, his lack of truthful information would prevent him to solve it. The crises would exacerbate, which, at some point, would propel the population to rebel and topple him. As a replacement, a less gullible king would be put into power. This looks like a control loop to me—one that gets rid of too gullible kings.
So, my strategy as detective would be to wait until the situation gets worse and stage a coup.
I want to argue that a healthy dose of artificial optimism can be useful (by the way, isn’t all optimism artificial? Otherwise, we would call it realism). This can be on a personal level: If you expect to have a good day, you are more likely to do things that will make your day good. Or, in your scenario, if a vassal whose region isn’t going great starts to praise it and gets more resources this way, he can invest them into rebuilding it (although I question the policy of assigning more resources to those regions that are faring well anyway).
As a side note, this reminds me of the Great Leap Forward under Mao, which caused millions of death by starvation. The main reason was deceitful reporting: as the information about crops needed to be collected at the central authority and it had to go through multiple levels (farmers themselves, districts, cities, counties, states) and at each level, the representatives exaggerated the numbers slightly, this added up and eventually led the top party officials to believe that everything was going great when millions were dying. (Of course, this is a hierarchical structure of vassals, but it’s still artificial optimism)