> Misattributing it to bears when it was really lead in gasoline or plastics in the air or whatever really caused it just delays your ability to help fix it, I

> Misattributing it to bears when it was really lead in gasoline or plastics in the air or whatever really caused it just delays your ability to help fix it, I was thinking of WWII in my 1940s example, which I thought might have been obvious, but that's besides the point. (Bear attacks are a silly example to illustrate the principle involved) If you're misattributing excess societal deaths to a wrong cause such as bears when the cause is anything else, there's a much bigger cost than just delaying your ability to understand and fix a real problem. 1) While you have the real cause of deaths wrong, people are dying of something else that is perhaps preventable. There's a real opportunity cost. 2) Say you work up a real social panic about something incorrect (such as bear attacks) and start reconfiguring society to focus solely on preventing bear attacks. Any policies here can cause dramatic harm to the economy. Not only does a bad economy directly and indirectly kill lots of people, but it weakens your ability to fix other more important problems. Your well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to save people from bears can kill far more people than it saves. 3) How would you know if your attempt to prevent bear attacks causes more harm than it prevents? All of a sudden, there's going to be a big industry of people making lots of cash in providing bear attack prevention methods. They're going to virulently attack anybody who starts voicing any opinions that are contrary to the general proclamation that bear attacks are the existential threat to society. Any opposition to the bear-attack-prevention-industrial-complex is going to be subject to intense derision and you're never going to be able to properly direct social energy to other, perhaps bigger problems, under this condition.