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Comment by pselbert | Hacker News Reader

Public awareness campaigns were key in stopping the ivory trade within the United States (before it was ramped up again by the Chinese). Demand is the real problem, and creating the image that ivory (or shark fin soup) isn't cool is extremely effective.

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Calling public awareness campaigns "extremely effective" is a vast simplification of the matter. Public awareness campaigns are good at pushing a substance towards being banned. Once a substance is prohibited, it is subject to the "forbidden fruit" effect, which I've mentioned below [1]. Additionally, if public awareness campaigns continue under a ban, they're likely to induce a "boomerang" effect. For instance, the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign may have promoted drug use and pro-cannabis attitudes in the young [2]. Crazy, right? Well, California did just legalize marijuana!

My guess is that parent is obliquely referring to that phenomenon.

In my chosen domain of rhinos, it is starting to look as though the public awareness campaigns run from 2008 to 2014 very well could've accidently spread the message that rhino horn is rare, risky, and desirable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287393

[2] http://findings.org.uk/docs/Ashton_M_1.pdf

So, speaking about your chosen field, Save the Rhino International and the International Rhino Foundation think rhino horns won't solve the problem:

https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/thorny_issues/synthe...

What is your response to this? I really want to save rhinos too, and I'm not sure how to help. I've donated to both of those organisations, and I kind of want to figure out how convince Vietnam that rhino horns absolutely do not cure cancer. Why do you think synthetic horns will work instead?

Not to besmirch SRT and IRF. They're good organizations that know a lot about rhinos and ecology. However, I have my doubts about their grasp of markets, psychology, history, and statistics among other things.

For instance, from 2008 to 2014 they pushed the message that rhino horn was being used for medicinal purposes. As early as 2012, some intrepid investigators started to make the case that that wasn't what was driving the poaching crisis. There is now a growing consensus that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was a red herring all along [1, 2].

I believe they're wrong about biofabricated horn too. If you're interested, you can read my rebuttal to their objections here:

https://sosv.com/why-pembient-is-confident-in-synthetic-rhin...

TL;DR: We have Nobel Prize-winning theory (Akerlof, 2001) underlying our proposed intervention.

[1] https://twitter.com/savetherhino/status/798885174520016896

[2] https://wildlifejustice.org/cn/overlooked-rhino-horn-demand-...

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/tables/trends/ci...

Yes, and? Smoking has never been outlawed; although, many have tried. I applaud demand reduction in lieu of prohibition. Once prohibition is in place, look out!

Do you have any example of such a campaign? I'm only aware of things like "drugs aren't cool", which isn't going to sway anyone. I wonder what an effective example of a public awareness campaign looks like.

The US undertook a widespread anti-littering campaign in the 1950s. We of course still have rubbish making it's way onto our road and walk ways but it's nothing compared to much of the rest of the world.

And it's nothing compared to what it used to be like in the US. Many people used to think nothing of just tossing food trash out the window.

The whole anti-littering campaign story is interesting. Apparently the original campaign that everyone (at least everyone over a certain age) remembers with the crying "Indian" (who was actually an Italian-American actor) wasn't really all that effective.

One of the later campaigns that were considered more effective included "Don't Mess with Texas" which featured actors like Chuck Norris.

I think that the second wave of KKK was stopped by something like this. The shark fin campaign in China was also a success.

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