Things you know, that ain’t so, or ‘everything you thought you know is false porn’… the Cobra Effect
A tweet:
Wow, I had spent the longest time believing the Cobra effect story of the British Raj was true, but had trouble finding a proper cite. Turns out googling it with “apocryphal” did the trick: it’s entirely made up. A lesson in trusting libertarian economistshttps://theweek.in/columns/bibek-debroy/2019/11/01/cobra-skin-and-rat-tails.html
https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/1642817306911703043
There are further useful comments in the chat — including the likelihood that this story about Chinese labourers on the Yangtze paying someone to whip them… https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/27/did-chinese-laborers-on-the-yangtze-pay-someone-to-whip-them-and-why-cant-political-scientists-and-economists-resist-telling-this-evidence-free-story/ (lots more in the comments there too)
…likely came from Asterix
https://twitter.com/LudditeHacker/status/1532386948047941632
This of course makes you wonder how many of the other examples are true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_original_cobra_effect
Parachuting cats probably *is* at least partly true…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cat_Drop
But many other things are not true, like ‘the fleas in the jar’ and ‘the boiling frog’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlpjA-QgmQM
And like the (slightly more complex) Mehrabian study… see https://conversational-leadership.net/mehrabian-myth/ and https://publicwords.com/2009/07/23/debunking-the-debunkers-the-mehrabian-myth-explained-correctly/
