@philosophyminis: The Cobra Effect is when we start optimising for our measurements and we forget what those measurements are for. And it starts with a story. During the British colonial rule of India, there was a cobra problem in Delhi. And so the government brought in a bounty on any cobras brought in. At first it worked. People caught the cobras, brought them in, and collected their money. But soon a few entrepreneurial sorts realised it was hard to catch wild cobras, and so they started to breed them in their own homes. They bred them, they killed them, and they cashed in. The government got wind of this, and so they cancelled the programme. And now all of these breeders had thousands of cobras with nothing to do with them. And so they released them into the wild. The problem was worse at the end than it was at the start. The Cobra Effect is when we try to measure a hospital by their waiting list, and so they change the definition of ‘waiting.’ It is when we measure the success of a school by grades, and so the curriculum becomes narrowly focused on what you can assess. It’s when social media platforms try to reduce harmful content by flagging certain words, users just invent new spellings and codes that the algorithms can’t catch. The Cobra Effect is about the danger of measurement. It is when the things that we track — our fitness rings, our salary, our follower count — stop becoming indicators, but the goal themselves. And so, the question becomes when did we start optimising for our metrics rather than the things that the metrics were for?

Jonny Thomson

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Region: GB

Friday 20 March 2026 14:22:01 GMT