The cobra and rat examples are examples of perverse incentives and the charitable interpretation of the tendency for institutions to preserve the problems to which they are solutions is that the "obvious" answer, such as "pay people to bring us cobras," may involve perverse incentives which didn't occur to the person who was like "I want this gone. I have a simple and direct solution: I will pay people to make it go away."

I am usually speaking of homelessness when I talk about the Shirky Principle. Programs to "help the homeless" are often well meaning but require there to continue to be homeless people to keep doing their work. So tying help to their current status can actively help keep people stuck.

It can be quite hard to decide you want to "help the homeless" or "decide to do something about homelessness" and find some way to mentally get yourself out of that box. It took me a long time to get to where I wanted to be mentally on that issue.

Actually doing something effective about a problem sometimes means not doing anything that sounds like solving that specific problem is your real goal. And that's kind of a tough place to go mentally and emotionally for most people.