"The story you are about to here is real. The names have been changed to protect the innocent..." All joking aside, this is not another April Fool's story. During my research for my recent post on Goodhart's Law, I came across a story that sounded a lot like an April Fool's joke. They say that anyone who believes everything that is posted on the Internet is a fool - but this is Wikipedia after all! Everything on Wikipedia is true, right?
As it turns out, there was a link on the Wikipedia page for Goodhart's Law that referred me to a page on Campbell's Law (very similar concept - I discussed this one in my post as well). I decided to look up more information on Campbell's Law and was referred to a Wikipedia page on the so-called "Cobra effect". The "Cobra effect" is basically another name for something that is called the "Law of Unintended Consequences." As the story goes, during the British colonial rule of India, there was a big problem with cobras - they were killing a lot of people. The British government decided to control the cobra population (smart administrators that they were) by offering a bounty for each dead cobra that was brought to the local authorities. What a great way to encourage the local population to take matters into their own hands, right? Well, unfortunately, the plan backfired. The local entrepreneurs started breeding cobras so that they could turn more cobras in to the government authorities and make a nice profit! The government caught on fairly quickly and abandoned the program. The entrepreneurs released the cobras that were bred in captivity into the wild - and the cobra population increased to even higher numbers than before the program started!
The Wikipedia page on the "Cobra effect" also mentions the "Rat effect." The time and place this time was the country of Vietnam under French colonial rule. The French government wanted to control the local rat population and offered a bounty for each rat tail that the locals brought in to the authorities (thinking that to get the rat tail, the rat would have to be killed). Again, in this particular case, the locals would cut of the tail and release the rat - the rat would then be free to breed and further increase the rat population (more tails = more money).
I don't know if these stories are true or not. However, I am reminded of a similar story that seems beyond belief, but I know it to be true. I was stationed at the Naval Hospital in Guam right after my pediatrics residency training. Guam is known for a lot of things. For example, Guam is home to the largest Kmart store in the world - it's true, look it up! The citizens of Guam are the number 1 per capita consumers of Spam in the world (also true). But did you know that there are more snakes on Guam than there are humans? At some point during World War II, a supply ship brought (by accident and unbeknownst to the crew and local authorities) the Brown Tree Snake from Papua New Guinea to Guam. The Brown Tree Snake is venomous - the Brown Tree Snake does not have fangs like a rattlesnake. It injects its venom by chewing repetitively on its victim (similar to the North American Coral snake). The Brown Tree Snake has no local predator - it completely wiped out Guam's indigenous bird population (there are no exotic birds on Guam!). The snake is also responsible for very frequent power outages, and the local authorities are always concerned about snakes "sneaking aboard" another ship or plane and wreaking havoc on the bird population of another island, such as Hawaii. Well, to make a long story short, there have been a lot of outlandish schemes to try to control (or even eliminate) the Brown Tree Snake population. The strangest that I have heard so far? Apparently the over-the-counter medication, acetaminophen is highly poisonous to the snake. The U.S. military apparently placed pellets of acetaminophen into dead mice, attached parachutes to the mice, and dropped the mice by plane over the jungle canopy with the hopes that the mice will get caught in the trees, where they will be ingested by the snakes. Sounds like a crazy, far-fetched April Fool's joke, but it is completely true (look it up or just read the article here. I can't imagine what the "Law of Unintended Consequences" would have to say about this one, but I guess we will just have to wait and see.
The moral of the story for today - beware the "unintended consequences."
No comments:
Post a Comment