this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Are you stupid?
I think Alk is referencing, the concept of perverse incentives. Without explicitly saying it. It's a concept, or a way of refering to an incentive structure that gives un-desirable results, in economics.
Example: When clicks give you ad revenue. And hurt kittens nurtured back to health gives the most clicks. People start hurting kittens, so they have more to nurture back to health for clicks.
Edit: my example is unfortunately a very real thing. Multiple channels on YT have been found to do it. Someone else will have to find the articles about it. I don't want to ruin my day reading about it again.
Less depressing example. A country (I think it was India but my memory is hazy and I'm too lazy to go google it right now) had a problem with a certain venomous snake. They decided to offer a bounty for every snake corpse brought to them. The goal was to incentivise people to hunt snakes. What actually happened was people started breeding the snakes to turn in for the bounties. They realized the program wasn't working and cancelled it at which point the breeders dumped their snakes into the wild making the whole situation even worse.
Youre right, it was in British India, where the British government came up with this scheme of rewarding the locals with money for captured / killed snakes in hopes of controlling the local snake population.