• Devial@discuss.online
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    8 days ago

    The issue is the crows are going to learn about this, and start just fishing rubbish out of bins, because it’s the easiest way to get their reward.

    There was once a Parisian dog who kept trying to push children into the Seine, because he had learned that if he ha saved a drowning child he gets tons of rewards.

    • tomiant@piefed.social
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      7 days ago

      This is not quite correct, what would happen is that you would get one group of crows teaming up and robbing the unaffiliated hard working crows of their cigarette butts, and you’d get a little crow empire with a King Crow just sitting on top of a mountain of cigarette butts in a posh parking lot and shitting on Lamborghini, Lexus, Cadillacs…

      • jqubed@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        For people who don’t want to watch a video, here’s the Wikipedia explanation:

        The results of a perverse incentive scheme are also sometimes called cobra effects, where people are incentivized to make a problem worse. This name was coined by economist Horst Siebert in 2001 based on a historically dubious anecdote taken from the British Raj. According to the story, the British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped, and the cobra breeders set their snakes free, leading to an overall increase in the wild cobra population.

          • jqubed@lemmy.world
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            7 days ago

            Sounds like we don’t know if this particular story is true, but that does seem to be a general bit of human nature that we see over and over again