[gojomo]

Here's one possible intuition:

There is one ground truth, origin, fixed point like the North Star: zero. There are an infinite number of possible falsehoods: all nonzero numbers. But Urbit chooses 1 as the canonical false.

[vidarh]

And this is close to the reason why you often see zero used a "success" in languages like C: There are many possible error values.

So it's not very original at all.

[urbit]

That's correct. :-)

[randallsquared]

Whoa. That does make it intuitive. :)

[gfodor]

this is that point where i get frustrated i can't post animated head-explode.gif's in HN.