They Paid People to Kill Cobras. They Got MORE Cobras | Nomolos

They put a price on dead cobras and ended up with more cobras. This is the cobra effect: why paying for a number so often backfires, and why it shows up everywhere from history to your workplace. The story goes that in colonial Delhi a bounty on cobras turned into a cobra-breeding business. In Hanoi in 1902, a bounty on rat tails produced rats with no tails, and rat farms. The same trap appears today in sales targets, KPIs, school testing and even AI reward hacking. In this animated documentary we look at how incentives work, why rewarding a measurable stand-in for what you want can backfire, and what Goodhart's law teaches anyone who sets a target. CHAPTERS 0:00 The cobra bounty 0:29 The snake farm 0:45 The cages open 1:14 How do you make people do anything? 1:41 Pay them: the power of incentives 1:58 The crack: paying for a proxy 2:24 What you measure is what you get 2:41 The Delhi story: part legend 3:12 Hanoi, 1902: rats in the sewers 3:41 Just bring the tail 4:04 Rats with no tails 4:16 The real math: farming rats 4:52 A name for it: Goodhart's law 5:13 Smashed dinosaur bones 5:36 Fake bank accounts, closed bugs 5:52 Buying a number 6:12 The proxy problem 6:40 The reversal 7:00 Nobody was stupid 7:24 It's everywhere, even in AI 7:52 The lesson 8:04 One person 8:28 Next: the emperor who wanted to live forever A note on honesty: the Delhi cobra bounty is famous but almost certainly part legend, with no solid colonial records behind it. The Hanoi rat hunt of 1902 is documented. SOURCES Horst Siebert, Der Kobra-Effekt: Wie man Irrwege der Wirtschaftspolitik vermeidet (2001), the book that named the cobra effect Michael G. Vann, "Of Rats, Rice, and Race: The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre, an Episode in French Colonial History", French Colonial History 4 (2003) Michael G. Vann and Liz Clarke, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018) Charles Goodhart (1975); "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", Marilyn Strathern's phrasing (1997) Wells Fargo: up to 3.5 million potentially unauthorized accounts (the bank's own review, August 2017) Next: over two thousand years ago, the first emperor of a unified China conquered everything except death. The potion meant to make him immortal is the thing that killed him. Subscribe so you don't miss it. #CobraEffect #GoodhartsLaw #Incentives #UnintendedConsequences #Economics #History #AnimatedDocumentary