[HN Gopher] Incentives and the Cobra Effect
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Incentives and the Cobra Effect
Author : momentmaker
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-02-06 17:35 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (boz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (boz.com)
| yoz wrote:
| For a hilarious short story about the Cobra Effect taken to
| extremes, check out Julian Gough's "The Great Hargeisa Goat
| Bubble": https://thefinanser.com/2009/05/the-great-hargeisa-goat-
| bubb...
| kulor wrote:
| An anecdote from our early per-seat pricing model is that we kept
| running into odd customer service issues that after lots of
| digging kept coming back to users sharing login details (to avoid
| paying for extra seats).
|
| Without getting into details, a lot of the value of our platform
| is derived from having discreet users connected to an
| organization.
|
| Rather than restricting or trying to educate people not to share
| accounts, we changed the pricing structure to a flat subscription
| which almost comically led to an explosion in new user account
| creation. This led to our customers getting the full intended
| value which led to a big reduction in churn and an increase in
| WoM referrals.
| waqf wrote:
| Discreet users, or discrete users? (I initially assumed you
| meant discreet, i.e. not wanting to share login details, but
| the comment read oddly as a result.)
| kulor wrote:
| Savvy observation. I meant to say discrete, though there's a
| healthy bit of irony in the typo
| nness wrote:
| Something I hope Netlify discovers...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I do not believe Netflix is still relying on word of mouth
| advertising
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Is the Cobra effect story true or is it a racist British/Western
| trope "Look how devious and greedy the Indians/natives are, even
| when we are trying to make their lives better?"
|
| Can you really breed Indian cobras in a home in captivity? Cobras
| are very good hunters and trying to keep them confined (remember
| how they are freed at the end of the story) and feed a growing
| population yourself is likely to take some time and effort,
| perhaps money that might not be worth the bounty?
| spacecadet wrote:
| Im inclined to believe this theory based purely on how miss
| leading most written history has shown to be in terms of
| racism.
| bradrn wrote:
| However, a very similar story has been proven true (or so
| Wikipedia claims):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| That story comes via the French and I don't think it passes
| the sniff test.
|
| In what scenario is it easier to cut the tail of a living
| (fighting) rat, than to kill it first and the cut the tail
| off a dead rat?
| 2cynykyl wrote:
| I think the point is that people were breeding rats so
| that they could make more money. Then when the ended the
| 'program', the rats just got released, making the problem
| worse, no?
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's a matter of the payoff though. Sure, it's easier to
| cut the tail off a single dead rat than a single live
| rat.
|
| But if your goal is to maximize the number of rat tails
| you end up with, cutting it off a live rat is probably
| worth the additional effort.
| jevoten wrote:
| You can breed a living, tailless rat to produce more
| rats.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| > has shown to be in terms of racism.
|
| by whom?
| khaki54 wrote:
| Really? What about "look how clever the Indians/ natives are?"
| Not everything is racism. A similar result occurs every time
| something like this is tried regardless of race. Countless
| examples including in the U.S. and yeah people will run scams
| like this even if the scam is convoluted and twice as much work
| as doing the honest thing.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I don't think it is clever to deliberately keep a bunch of
| cobras in your home and then set them free.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It's called animal breeding and people still make money
| doing it!
|
| Improperly disposing of your animals when you realize
| there's no market for them anymore is the issue here.
| khaki54 wrote:
| Yeah but if you dreed a bunch of cobras in your house, it
| solves the rat problem and keeps the neighbors away
| rob74 wrote:
| Or it's an Indian trope "look how stupid the British are" ?
| mihaic wrote:
| While this story was initially against the hubris of controlling
| a complex system through incentives, since second or third order
| effect are hard to predict, I think over time the takeaway has
| degenerated into "you can't have any centrally pushed
| incentives".
|
| Not sure when the aim to strike a balance was lost.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Also, perverse incentives arise spontaneously all the time.
| Business types love talking about this, they will talk your ear
| off about it, but only from the angle that looks to exploit
| them as tactics or strategic moats with studiously suppressed
| consideration for the first order effects let alone second or
| third. If you so much as hint that you think maybe there ought
| to be a countervailing force somewhere, suddenly COBRA EFFECT
| HOW DARE YOU COMMUNIST CENTRAL PLANNING ECONOMIC ILLITERATE
| FILTH! It leaves me with the distinct impression that nobody
| really believes in the system, let alone "warts and all," and
| instead just grabs the nearest self-serving principle off the
| shelf to rationalize whatever they want to do.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _I heard a story from a friend in South Africa that their town
| had legalized the hunting of endangered rhinoceroses. This sounds
| like a shockingly bad idea. [...] There are more examples like
| this. [...] Sex education reduces incidences of teen pregnancy._
|
| After initially being confused, this reminded me that there _are_
| still people who consider sex education to be a "shockingly bad
| idea". And that made me sad...
| mhb wrote:
| Why is that a clever idea? If you can make the landowners pay a
| fee when a rhino gets killed on their land, why not just make
| them pay a fine instead? But, it's South Africa so the thinking
| there seems a little muddled recently.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Might be human nature.
|
| Fee. People will pay huge 'fees' for some feature or access,
| or privilege.
|
| Fine. People will riot in the streets if the exact same value
| was applied as a fine or a tax. 'what a huge fine, that is
| totally un-fair'.
|
| A fee makes it seem like a choice.
|
| A fine, everyone is mad, even people that it wont ever apply
| too.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Plus, a fee has an element of conspicuous consumption to
| it, where people are proud to pay the fee (if they value
| the thing), and will simply avoid it if they don't care
| about the thing.
| yaky wrote:
| Anecdote from my old job:
|
| Management issued a directive that there should be "no failed
| sprints". Teams started either putting 1-3 small tickets on the
| sprint, or filling the sprint with tickets which have already
| been technically completed (during the previous sprint,
| naturally). Any difficult or complex tickets were simply not
| placed on a sprint until they were figured out.
| DenisM wrote:
| Did that work out well for the business? Maybe that's what they
| wanted? It's a serious question.
| feoren wrote:
| Has anyone else experienced that perverse incentives are
| _extremely_ hard to get anyone to listen to you about? I find
| myself saying the words "but then people will be incentivized to
| ..." surprisingly often, and it's almost always dismissed as some
| irrelevant academic argument. Incentives really genuinely can
| drive behavior in a big way, and you really genuinely can predict
| some perverse incentives ahead of time, but even asking to talk
| through what those incentives might be for some new decision just
| gets _total_ dismissal, like I 'm talking about auras and
| astrology. What gives?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You are absolutely right. Good intentions are not enough. We
| should all keep repeating this at the tops of our voices.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| It's super frustrating! Someone says, "Something needs to be
| done about this problem, and X is something, so X needs to be
| done." Then if you say X will backfire, you're taken as
| supporting the problem. It's a real rhetoric challenge.
| godelski wrote:
| Quite frequently. Personally, I think part of the issue is
| explicit vs implicit noise in the system. There's always noise
| in the system, so there is always reasons to reject or
| criticize something. Very few things have unobjectionable
| global optima. But if noise is explicit in the system, people
| tend to take a bit more care. If it is implicit, well people
| act like the metric is doing exactly what it is intended to do
| and can't be hacked.
|
| Momentum is a pretty powerful force.
|
| [Edit]: I thought I'd add a clear example because I was
| reminded of it. When I tell people that return free filing
| taxes could really simplify taxes for people at first agree and
| then start pointing out a bunch of edge cases. So I argue that
| if we could just get the 15 million Americans who use the 1040
| EZ then that's a big step in the right direction. It never goes
| well and it is never considered that just autofilling
| everything you normally put in by hand significantly reduces
| time regardless of how you do your taxes. Maybe I'm just bad at
| making cases, maybe people are hard of hearing, maybe both.
| (this is not the argument I make in full, obviously)
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I've observed that too and it raises some interesting
| psychological thoughts.
|
| A linguistic distinction may help if we say that incentives are
| not quite the same thing as motives.
|
| Motives can be intrinsic, coming only from one actor. "I am
| motivated to learn the piano". (See Pink, "Drive" etc)
|
| Incentives are a relation between two actors, one
| (leader/manager) who sets the incentives to shape the behaviour
| of another. The 'incentivised person' is acted upon and is the
| target of the incentives.
|
| That means the leader has to have a working model of both the
| environment (and other parametric factors) and of the group or
| individual they want to incentivise.
|
| If you challenge that internal working model you're not just
| playing with logic and reason about parameters, you're
| challenging someone's perception - and that's much closer to
| the ego.
|
| There was a good article posted earlier by Christine VanDeVelde
| Luskin on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in the Bing
| preschool. Kids always know when you're playing games at
| "incentivising" them. They know it's a "bribe", which lessens
| your integrity, and they act up in response.
|
| In my opinion the manipulator has a bit of a binary choice.
| Either be absolutely up-front and tell people "I am doing X as
| an incentive for you to behave as Y, and I expect accordant
| behaviour", or, be so clever as totally hide your manipulation.
| The former requires the overt exercise of power, or at least
| risks the vulnerability of total honesty.
|
| I think nost perverse incentives come from people treading the
| middle ground, being deceptive, thinking they are being clever
| nudging others. But those others see right through the game.
| jerf wrote:
| Not just perverse incentives, or incentives in general. People
| have a hard time thinking about second-order effects of all
| kinds and tend to think quite linearly. They're treating you
| the same as auras and astrology because they are unable to tell
| the difference.
| zackmorris wrote:
| This article sums up the biggest problem with politics. Rather
| than just trying various policies in simulation, we argue about
| them dogmatically until the end of time.
|
| After a lifetime of witnessing tax cuts grow wealth inequality
| and burden the poor and middle classes, I view people in favor of
| them with concern. I wonder if they're able to extrapolate cause
| and effect to understand the ramifications of their choices. And
| they look at me the same way, I imagine as an astonishing waste
| of potential since I'm apparently miserable all the time and
| unable to cope with a world that wasn't designed for me, when I
| could just conform and be wealthy and successful. I don't know
| what to say to that, because I'm not sure that either of us is
| wrong.
|
| We can get mad about this stuff and pout and refuse to cooperate,
| but it reminds me of the scene in the Matrix when Neo is faced
| with saving humanity or the one he loves. The logical choice
| often isn't the right one, because consciousness and free will
| can tap into higher-level aspects of reality that transcend logic
| via intuition and emotions like love.
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