The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned (2017)
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Do your performance measures correspond directly to things you care about? Are there ways of optimising the number while hurting something that matters to you? A good example to me is Google marking a picture of a black couple as "gorillas" - to a training algorithm that can easily be counted as a single wrong answer equivalent to any other when it is actually very significant.
Edit - this is the same for optimising any KPI, but ML is a case where your optimiser has no wider context and so there's more surprising cases. Worth thinking about overall though, what are you rewarding?
Rio was infested with bubonic plague and yellow fever. Oswald started a campaign to get the city rid of mosquitoes and rats including the same idea of buying rats from the population. The result were the same, people began importing rats from neighboring towns and breeding them at home. He later switched the focus into hygiene and sanitation.
Cruz is also famous for making vaccination mandatory in Brazil, a decision that led to the infamous Vaccine Rebelion in Brazil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt
> These days, the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre is mostly cited as an example of the “Cobra Effect,” an economic theory about how incentives, in a complex system, can lead to perverse, unintended consequences. Sometimes, it’s trotted out as argument against government intervention of any kind—but Vann says that that kind of misses the point.
From the other article on the front page today, "Why Recycling Doesn't Work". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19889365
> When they were first introduced, blue boxes on Canadian driveways and sidewalks seemed almost revolutionary. People were “extremely enthusiastic,” says Dan Hoornweg, a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. They “really wanted to recycle.” But the box came with conditions—an unfortunate compromise between environmentalists, government, and the soft-drink industry that created the perfect conditions for an explosion in litter.
https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/the-great-hanoi-rat-hunt...
If people are going to go ahead and cheat the system en masse, no system of incentives will ever work properly and they will languish.
Civil society requires us to generally do the right thing, most of the time, because there's ample opportunity to be shortsighted and cheat.
FYI Here's how Alberta git rid of rats [1], though I don't see any mention of rewards either, more of a publicly managed awareness program with hired pets killers.
[1] https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
"Buildings are occasionally moved or torn down, and in some cases, rats are dug out with a backhoe or bulldozer."
Although, I do know of one case where the locals gave up on a building (exterminator said no, the cats ran for it, and hantavirus was a concern). They cut a trench around the building, filled it with gas, lit the trench up, then set the building on fire. It was a bit horrific. They built another building on the same plot but not the exact same place.
If for some odd reason, you are doing thing yourself (why?!), do remember the order: dig trench -> fill trench -> ignite trench -> ignite structure. Do the order of the last two step wrong can result in a very scary video on YouTube. Do not have squeamish people there with you. Keep plenty of firefighting gear near.
~historian Michael Vann