Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In
Speaker 1: this episode, we're gonna we're gonna be talking about some
Speaker 1: darker content towards the end, as the title of the
Speaker 1: episode implies, and indeed even the darker, the less dark
Speaker 1: elements we're gonna talk about are kind of a crash
Speaker 1: course in the the The Misadventures of Coloni Hillism. But
Speaker 1: before we get into all of that, we thought we'd
Speaker 1: we'd kick off with maybe some lighter content. Yeah, Robert,
Speaker 1: I understand that you want to tell me about peep nuts. Yes,
Speaker 1: I would love to tell you about not only peep nuts, Joe,
Speaker 1: but poop candy as well. Poop candy that's what the
Speaker 1: dog believes comes out of the cats. But oh, now
Speaker 1: you've taken into darker territory, Joe, But no, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the rearing of human children as opposed
Speaker 1: to dogs here. Um and this ties into the overall
Speaker 1: theme here, the use of the often the use of
Speaker 1: bounties and bribes, and then what happens when the economics
Speaker 1: of that spirals out of control. So my son is
Speaker 1: for now, But there was a time not too long
Speaker 1: ago when we were trying to potty train him to
Speaker 1: get him to actually um urinate and defecate in the
Speaker 1: toilet when he needed to go, listen to his body
Speaker 1: and follow up. So it's apparently not enough just to
Speaker 1: say that is where you go do such business and
Speaker 1: point to the toilet. You actually you need to introduce
Speaker 1: some incentives to motivate this behavior, right and there there
Speaker 1: there are as many different schools of parenting as there
Speaker 1: are parents. So some some people have a real problem
Speaker 1: with with using bribes in any situation. But hey, that's
Speaker 1: what we did in it work for us. Then you've
Speaker 1: also got the poop anywhere parents, who I hear a
Speaker 1: real trouble. Well that's now I know people who are
Speaker 1: using that technique and that that seems to work for them.
Speaker 1: But I was just kidding. Wait, that's a real parenting philosopher.
Speaker 1: I thought you were anywhere. Well, there's there are different
Speaker 1: toilet training techniques that imply it's not so much a
Speaker 1: poop anywhere. Um, what it means is like the kid
Speaker 1: will go around without pants on, and then when they
Speaker 1: need to go, you scoop them up. Um, that's sort
Speaker 1: of thing. So that's what I thought you were okay there,
Speaker 1: Believe me. There are a lot of different techniques out there.
Speaker 1: And uh, and and that one in particularly, I know
Speaker 1: some people who have used that and it made work
Speaker 1: for them. In our case, though, we we issued a
Speaker 1: strict bounty for every successful urination in the potty. Um,
Speaker 1: he would get one honey sessame nut from this little
Speaker 1: bag honey sesame. Yeah, like you buy a Trader Joe's.
Speaker 1: And oh, they're they're delicious. U. I had to stop
Speaker 1: eating them for a while when they were when they
Speaker 1: became peepy nuts for me, and kind of there by association.
Speaker 1: But they're great. Uh. And on the other hand, for
Speaker 1: every successful poop in the toilet, which is was even
Speaker 1: more important to us at the time, he would get
Speaker 1: a single fruit gummy and that was the poop candy.
Speaker 1: So the policy proved effective for us, but it also
Speaker 1: led to a period during which he began to make
Speaker 1: a case that each piece of feces was surely a
Speaker 1: separate poop and should then result in additional poop candies
Speaker 1: as well as the as any interruption in the stream
Speaker 1: of urine would result in two or more instances of urination,
Speaker 1: and each would require a separate reward. Okay, well this
Speaker 1: this is smart bargaining. Actually, yeah, yeah, and it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's crazy too when I look back and realized that
Speaker 1: he hadn't and he still hasn't really discovered the power
Speaker 1: of lying. Uh so, but there was still this tendency
Speaker 1: to bend the rule and even break the spirit of
Speaker 1: the rule for greater rewards. Now, after that we clarified
Speaker 1: the policy and then luckily we were able to phase
Speaker 1: it out shortly after that. But how might things have
Speaker 1: escalated if if we hadn't You know, That's that's something
Speaker 1: to think about and I've been thinking about in researching
Speaker 1: this topic. Well, Robert, I want to tell you at story.
Speaker 1: It might not be a true story, but but it's
Speaker 1: an interesting story with some very true analogs about the
Speaker 1: power of incentives and the sometimes unintended consequences of incentives,
Speaker 1: and about serpents of course, asps very dangerous. Now, the
Speaker 1: story goes something like this, In colonial India, you had
Speaker 1: a British colonial administrator who decided there were too many
Speaker 1: cobras in the city of Delhi. You know, I got
Speaker 1: cobra's coming out of my ears. We gotta get rid
Speaker 1: of all these things. Though, I wonder what that actually
Speaker 1: looked like. I mean, if this really happened. I know
Speaker 1: we're all picturing that scene in Raiders of the Lost
Speaker 1: Art exactly, but it was probably more like I saw
Speaker 1: one cobra and that was too many. We've got a
Speaker 1: cobra problem in the city. But anyway, so he wanted
Speaker 1: to get rid of the cobras in the city, kill
Speaker 1: them all, get him out of here. So he came
Speaker 1: up with a solution. Put a bounty on the Cobraska.
Speaker 1: That makes sense. So if you kill a cobra, just
Speaker 1: bring the dead snake to the government office and receive
Speaker 1: a cash award. Yeah. They are making it worth your
Speaker 1: while to take time out of your day to kill
Speaker 1: a snake or two. Yeah. And at first it seemed
Speaker 1: like this was working great. They're collecting plenty of cobras.
Speaker 1: But before long, the local administrators discovered a problem. The
Speaker 1: people have figured out a way to game the system
Speaker 1: and turn the snake bounty into free money. They weren't
Speaker 1: catching cobras from the city and killing them. They were
Speaker 1: farming cobras at home, killing them once they were mature,
Speaker 1: and then bringing them in to get the bounty. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously they couldn't allow this kind of mischief to continue,
Speaker 1: so the administrators ended the cobra bounty. But now you
Speaker 1: had all these snake breeders who had been farming cobras
Speaker 1: in order to get the bounty, and they're they're stuck
Speaker 1: with hundreds of worthless snakes. So what do you do
Speaker 1: with them. We'll just release them, so they have no
Speaker 1: inciative for keeping them. They release them into the streets,
Speaker 1: and the cobra population in the city drastically increases. This
Speaker 1: lead to the principle that's now known to economists as
Speaker 1: the cobra effect, and it's when a strategy implemented to
Speaker 1: solve a problem directly makes the problem worse. And the
Speaker 1: story about cobras and Delhi, as I mentioned, might be
Speaker 1: nothing more than a modern folk tale. I haven't come
Speaker 1: across any evidence that it actually happened, but there are
Speaker 1: plenty of examples where exactly this type of thing has
Speaker 1: definitely occurred in the real world. That's right, and one
Speaker 1: of them occurs with another colonial situation, another infestation in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Speaker 1: All right, this would have been the nineteenth century. So
Speaker 1: you have French colonial authorities in Vietnam, and you know,
Speaker 1: there are various problems to focus in on, but the
Speaker 1: one they choose to really apply their attention to is
Speaker 1: the city's rap problem. Now, I can imagine the rap
Speaker 1: problem was probably a real problem, probably a real problem
Speaker 1: that you know, like the cobra thing. You can imagine
Speaker 1: a colonial administrator sees one cobra and decides that there's
Speaker 1: a hober problem in the city, right, Yeah, because I
Speaker 1: can't think of a situation where another city has had
Speaker 1: had a snake infestation problem off hand. But rats, of course,
Speaker 1: rat problems have been an issue throughout human history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's quite common to have rat problems in any large
Speaker 1: population center. People produce a lot of garbage. Garbage is tasty.
Speaker 1: They have sewers that are great places to dwell in
Speaker 1: and have your little breeding grounds. Yeah, they're smart and
Speaker 1: they're successful. And uh as was learned. And this is
Speaker 1: the other key thing. This is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that they focused in on rats so much, is that
Speaker 1: in eighteen four, that's when Alexandra Yearson discovered that debonic
Speaker 1: plague was caused caused by little fleas that wrote on rats.
Speaker 1: So that so you can see why they were concerned.
Speaker 1: So what did they do? Well, they did what what
Speaker 1: often happens in these cases. They assigned some professional rat
Speaker 1: catchers to take care of everything. But then that's not enough,
Speaker 1: so they turned of all and tears. They turned to
Speaker 1: two mercenary rat catchers, and they offer a bounty of
Speaker 1: one cent per rat tail. And the idea here was that,
Speaker 1: especially since the disease was an issue, asking the rat
Speaker 1: catchers to handle the body was gonna be too much
Speaker 1: to ask, would be a burden and just a little
Speaker 1: growth right from what I've read, You know, they'd catch
Speaker 1: thousands of rats in the sewer in in a very
Speaker 1: short period of time. Lugging all those dead rat bodies
Speaker 1: would actually be really heavy, yeah, and then discussing, so
Speaker 1: just to prove how many you killed, really, just take
Speaker 1: the tail, right, So that's yeah, that's exactly what they did.
Speaker 1: Brought in the tail, and it seemed to be working
Speaker 1: at first, but then the authorities began to notice something
Speaker 1: curious in the streets. They've noticed a bunch of rats
Speaker 1: running around without tails, So they quickly realized that some
Speaker 1: of those enterprising rat catchers out there were simply lopping
Speaker 1: the tails off of the wild rats when they caught them,
Speaker 1: perhaps out of laziness, but more likely so that tail
Speaker 1: is rats could go forth breed and produce more rat
Speaker 1: tails to harvest. You know, they were being economically smart,
Speaker 1: they were they were trying to you know, if you
Speaker 1: are living off the land, you don't want to destroy
Speaker 1: all of the vegetation in the land, so you only
Speaker 1: pick from some of the plants. You don't kill every plant. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like the policy or the policy that's supposed to
Speaker 1: be in place with stone crabs. You harvest one of
Speaker 1: the of the the clause and then you let the
Speaker 1: creature go. You don't harvest them both. So that that
Speaker 1: was one of the ramifications of the bounty. But much
Speaker 1: like our cobra example, this the exact same thing took place.
Speaker 1: Um others took advantage of the law by establishing rat farms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because rats are are easy to breed. I mean, you
Speaker 1: don't even have to try. I really don't have to try.
Speaker 1: You just to collect some rats and let them do
Speaker 1: their thing, and you're gonna have more rats, which you
Speaker 1: can then lock their tails off and collect your bounty.
Speaker 1: So the French were horrified that their efforts to curb
Speaker 1: the rat population was actually increasing it, and they scrapped
Speaker 1: the bounty program entire early. And in nine three bubonic
Speaker 1: plague broke out in Hanoi. Oh no, Yeah, so there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot more there are. There are a number
Speaker 1: of more angles to this story. There's a great paper
Speaker 1: out there that ties all of this in with this
Speaker 1: sort of the doom nature of French rule in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: and it's titled of Rats, Rice and Race, The Great
Speaker 1: annoy Rat Massacre, An Episode in French Colonial History by
Speaker 1: Michael g Van. Yeah. And there's an older episode of
Speaker 1: Freakonomics Radio actually the deals exactly with the Cobra effect
Speaker 1: that I listened to, and it's a good episode. It's
Speaker 1: worth checking out. So we won't rehash everything they cover
Speaker 1: in their show, but just to mention a couple other
Speaker 1: interesting examples they bring up. One is a very similar
Speaker 1: situation to the rats in Hanoi, but this is with
Speaker 1: Ferrell pigs in Fort Benning, Georgia. So it's a local tale. Right,
Speaker 1: have you been to Fort Benning? I've been through there,
Speaker 1: I believe. Yeah, did you see any pigs? No? No,
Speaker 1: I saw I saw an interesting overpass, and I believe
Speaker 1: that's that's the extent of it. Okay, Well, anyway, it's
Speaker 1: in I think southwest Georgia's that. Yeah. So there are
Speaker 1: a lot of wild pigs in this area. They're they're
Speaker 1: invasive Ferrell pigs, and they do a lot of damage.
Speaker 1: They dig everything up, they get into your garbage, they
Speaker 1: eat everything. They caused damage to government property and buildings.
Speaker 1: So people wanted to do something about this Ferrell pig problem.
Speaker 1: So there was a cash bounty exchange program for pig
Speaker 1: tails established to fight the feral pig problem. But same
Speaker 1: problems we've encountered before. There's a lot of suspicion that
Speaker 1: some of these pig tails people were turning in for
Speaker 1: a cash reward came from illicit sources, maybe some meat processing,
Speaker 1: We're not exactly sure. And then in the end, it
Speaker 1: looks like baiting practices established by the pig bounty hunters
Speaker 1: actually probably increased the number of wild pigs in the area.
Speaker 1: So people claim all these cash rewards because they put
Speaker 1: out a bunch of food to attract pigs, and then
Speaker 1: they shoot some of them, but you know, you were
Speaker 1: feeding the pig EIGs, fattening them up for breeding and
Speaker 1: producing more pigs, because you're you're trying to put a
Speaker 1: value on the elimination of the animal, but in doing so,
Speaker 1: you've put a value on the continued life of the animal. Exactly. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's interesting how that how that plays out. And this
Speaker 1: brings me to a thought about the nature of incentives,
Speaker 1: because it's sort of highlights that you can't have an
Speaker 1: incentive that's just sort of logically associated with the outcome
Speaker 1: you want. In order to try to prevent the gaming
Speaker 1: of the system, you really need to make incentives as
Speaker 1: closely aligned to the actual desired outcome as possible. So
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is, if you want to
Speaker 1: eliminate cobras from the city, don't offer cash rewards for
Speaker 1: dead cobras because you don't want dead cobras. That's not
Speaker 1: the outcome you're looking for. You want an absence of cobras. So,
Speaker 1: but that's a lot harder to incentivize, right, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have to somebody come along and investigate for cobra free
Speaker 1: spaces exactly. Yeah, you need more complex systems to try
Speaker 1: to incentivize that. So, for example, maybe you could establish
Speaker 1: a Cobra Control Authority and then the employees of this
Speaker 1: organization are given a cash bonus that's proportional to how
Speaker 1: few Cobra bytes are reported in local hospitals in a
Speaker 1: given year. But even with that, you run into some
Speaker 1: some problems, right like without strict controls on that, what
Speaker 1: if you have members of the Cobra control authority intimidating
Speaker 1: people not to report their Cobra bytes or not to
Speaker 1: go to the hospital, or intimidating people at hospitals not
Speaker 1: to report them to the government. Uh So, it just
Speaker 1: seems like whenever you introduce incentive programs to to a
Speaker 1: wide ranging you know, a group of participants to the public,
Speaker 1: essentially you you introduce the problem that people are going
Speaker 1: to find ways to access the reward without helping you
Speaker 1: achieve your goal. It's it seems like it should be
Speaker 1: a doctor's Seuss book or kind of um, a source
Speaker 1: of apprentice kind of tail, right, just that as it
Speaker 1: spirals out of control in these examples, UM, I can't
Speaker 1: help but think of quotas that are set forth for
Speaker 1: law enforcements. Sometimes you know, like you know, you've got
Speaker 1: to get so many speeding tickets out there, and so
Speaker 1: you end up having a police officers setting up in
Speaker 1: speed traps to to hit those quotas, which in that case,
Speaker 1: I guess it's not a clear it's not necessarily making
Speaker 1: the problem worse, but it's also just kind of like
Speaker 1: we're not really stopping it. We're just kind of like
Speaker 1: setting up a system to continually collect the bounty on speeding. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: I guess I can see where there's a balance there, right,
Speaker 1: So if if it depends on how the quota is
Speaker 1: and how aggressive you are and carrying it out, Because
Speaker 1: if there's a balance to where all right, you're just
Speaker 1: people know not to go above a certain speed or
Speaker 1: they should know and and if they don't, they get
Speaker 1: a ticket. So like both and that is going to
Speaker 1: make the road safer. But I guess the more the
Speaker 1: focus is on hitting the quota, getting the essentially the bounty,
Speaker 1: and losing sight of the purpose of the law entirely,
Speaker 1: that's where things get out of whacking. You end up
Speaker 1: with like notorious speed traps, right, And I think this
Speaker 1: gets into a concept that's very closely related to the
Speaker 1: Cobra effect, though I think Technically, the Cobra effect wouldn't
Speaker 1: have to be just in incentives and economics. If you're
Speaker 1: talking more generally about anything where an attempt to solve
Speaker 1: a problem makes the problem worse. You couldn't even go
Speaker 1: to the example of of like aka Homo. You know
Speaker 1: that that great story of the person who is trying
Speaker 1: to touch up this this classic painting of Christ in
Speaker 1: his passion moment had some damage to it over the
Speaker 1: years trying to touch it up, and he ends up
Speaker 1: having this kind of wailing monkey face. Yes, which is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite images from the whole Internet. Yes,
Speaker 1: but and then she wasn't working for a bounty. But
Speaker 1: imagine if there was a bounty out there on restoring
Speaker 1: old works of art you could end up with with however,
Speaker 1: many of these strange little monkey faces just completely obliterating
Speaker 1: art history. Yeah, I guess the problem there is that
Speaker 1: you are you are giving people who don't have proper
Speaker 1: training in an area and incentive to participate in the area,
Speaker 1: and thus they're probably going to make things worse. But
Speaker 1: another way of framing the issue is just the concept
Speaker 1: of perverse incentives, meaning, specifically, in the Cobra effect, you're
Speaker 1: the intended solution to a problem makes that problem worse.
Speaker 1: Perverse incentives can just mean incentives that cause unintended negative outcomes,
Speaker 1: especially if they're contrary to the benefit of the people
Speaker 1: who offer the incentives. This all also reminds me of
Speaker 1: a moment in one of my favorite books, Uh, Cornman
Speaker 1: McCarthy's sentry. Oh yeah, we talked about this the other
Speaker 1: day where there's a bounty on I think raybies bats
Speaker 1: in that book in there, Yeah, like the local university
Speaker 1: there there, they want to or is it health of
Speaker 1: Art and I can't remember it's been but interested official
Speaker 1: parties would like to see the bodies of local bats. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I think it's because of rabies. Yeah. There's
Speaker 1: a very enterprising young character in the book named Harrogate.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of the book is arrested for having
Speaker 1: illicit relations with watermelons that did not belong to him.
Speaker 1: But then later on he comes up with some just
Speaker 1: ingenious schemes for collecting bats. I think, far more bats
Speaker 1: than was really than he was intended to collect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he ends up strolling into town was just a sack
Speaker 1: of dead bats, which he gets by belief. He buys
Speaker 1: some poison, and he poisons little pieces of meat and
Speaker 1: slingshots them into the air because the bats are accustomed
Speaker 1: to praying on insects that are flying through the I
Speaker 1: believe that's the scheme. That's a great book. It is
Speaker 1: this is that makes me want to read it. Aget
Speaker 1: that at any rate. The end up the doctor the
Speaker 1: scientists confronting him when he brings this bag in, and
Speaker 1: he's says, we know you you did not define these bats,
Speaker 1: but we can't forge out how you did it. You've
Speaker 1: got to tell us how you actually killed these bats.
Speaker 1: And then he he relates the story of the slingshot.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's it. He was supposed to be collecting
Speaker 1: dead bats. When he said he was killing, he was
Speaker 1: making dead bats. So you know, in a sense they
Speaker 1: were I guess the effort here was to protect humans,
Speaker 1: protect health, but also you know, not eradicate bats. That
Speaker 1: was not the intended outcome, but Harrogate did his best
Speaker 1: to do just that in order to get the sweet bounty.
Speaker 1: But of course, that is not the only book by
Speaker 1: our great brutal novelist Cormick McCarthy to feature bounties. That's right,
Speaker 1: there's also blood Meridian great novel, horrific novel um in
Speaker 1: large ways, I think unfilmable novel, and I kind of
Speaker 1: hope it's unfilmable. It is, uh would you would you
Speaker 1: call it nihilistic? Yes? It is. Uh. Yeah, there's just
Speaker 1: not much redeemable in the world than it is. A
Speaker 1: book of uh, brutal and cruel people doing brutal and
Speaker 1: cruel things, and one individual who might not be a
Speaker 1: person at all, who might be an embodiment of of
Speaker 1: awfulness to judge Judge Holden, who himself is probably based
Speaker 1: very loosely on a real individual who was in a
Speaker 1: gang of scalp hunters led by an actual historic individual,
Speaker 1: one John Galton, who was indeed a superstar in the
Speaker 1: vile trade of scalp hunting um harvesting, by some accounts
Speaker 1: that two and fifty scalps in a single raid once
Speaker 1: and fittingling. His group was eventually ambushed and scalped by
Speaker 1: a band of Quichan tribespeople. So um, So we shouldn't
Speaker 1: dwell too much on the nasty details, but we do
Speaker 1: need to discuss what scalping is and and scalp hunting,
Speaker 1: what what this practice consists of, and where it came from. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so uh. I mean most of you probably don't even
Speaker 1: need to be told, especially if you've consumed much in
Speaker 1: the way of American Western history or fiction. Not only
Speaker 1: Blood Meridian, but Larry mcmurtry' is a Lonesome Dove. Novels
Speaker 1: instantly come to mind as well, but actually never read
Speaker 1: Lonesome Dove. Oh it's it's quite it's quite good. Uh.
Speaker 1: Comanche Moon is another one in that series that I
Speaker 1: read that was really good and really bizarre in many ways.
Speaker 1: But both of these authors really really gaze deep into
Speaker 1: the gruesome spectacle of the act. It entails the slicing flame,
Speaker 1: ripping away of a portion or all of the human
Speaker 1: scalp um and then then then you have this resulting trophy. Uh.
Speaker 1: The victim can be living or dead. And there are
Speaker 1: plenty of tales of scalping survivors, including in eighteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: Probably the most famous is a thirteen year old Robert
Speaker 1: McGee um. And he's famous because there's a wonderful, gruesome
Speaker 1: photograph of him as an adult showing off his scalping
Speaker 1: scars scars so um. And in this case he was
Speaker 1: helped by a band of uh. Sioux Indians. So I
Speaker 1: look up that photo online if you don't really want
Speaker 1: to see it. Um, But where did the act come from?
Speaker 1: That's actually something that has been, uh there's been a
Speaker 1: kind of a debate on that over the years, right,
Speaker 1: because we definitely do see it practiced by by both
Speaker 1: sides in the American frontier. Right. Yeah, So it's it
Speaker 1: comes down to, is this, uh, an ancient Native American
Speaker 1: act that various cultural groups took part in, or is
Speaker 1: this something that westerners introduced, that the colonists introduced to
Speaker 1: the New World. Um. Now, certainly scalping was long attributed
Speaker 1: as a purely Native American act, and indeed we see
Speaker 1: plenty of examples of of scalping, both between tribes and
Speaker 1: against the colonial invaders. Yeah, and that's that's something I
Speaker 1: think even when I was a kid. Just my idea
Speaker 1: of where this came from. I guess if you watch
Speaker 1: old cartoons or something like that, you get the idea
Speaker 1: that this is something that Native American tribes that their
Speaker 1: warriors would do to the enemies, not something that was
Speaker 1: done by European settlers. But in fact, it was done
Speaker 1: by European settlers. Yeah. Yeah, and we'll see some plenty
Speaker 1: of examples of that to come here, But it was
Speaker 1: I think it is often presented as this kind of
Speaker 1: savage thing that savage tribes people do. Um Eurocentric view
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, Now there was certainly a backlash against
Speaker 1: that view, has pointed out in a wonderful article titled
Speaker 1: The Unkindest cut Or Who Invented Scalping by James Axtell
Speaker 1: and William C. Struvan in nineteen eighty And if you
Speaker 1: want to blow by bloody blow account of the history
Speaker 1: of scalping, that's a good article to seek out. But
Speaker 1: they say that the the quote unquote savage Indian take
Speaker 1: on scalping was replaced during the twentieth century for a
Speaker 1: spell there by Native American activists who who really pushed
Speaker 1: forward the view that all that it was basically bloodthirsty
Speaker 1: colonials who introduced the practice to the native peoples of
Speaker 1: the America's by encouraging them to do so by instituting
Speaker 1: bounties on on other on other tribes people and essentially
Speaker 1: teaching them to take these headskins from others. So, under
Speaker 1: this revisionist view, the scalping practice came from the European
Speaker 1: settlers and was transferred to the frontier tribes correct time. However,
Speaker 1: after this, a lot of you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: people on the other side of the the issue they
Speaker 1: weighed in. And really, when you do look at the
Speaker 1: history and look at the historical accounts, you see that
Speaker 1: the practice of taking scalps goes back way through colonial
Speaker 1: invasion to pre Columbian times, okay, and it was quite
Speaker 1: widespread through North America, even parts of South America. There's
Speaker 1: there's archaeological evidence that shows evidence of post mortem scalpings
Speaker 1: and skulls that showed evidence that the victim survived the
Speaker 1: mutilation long enough for the bone tissue to regenerate. And
Speaker 1: another point that's often brought up is that certainly Europeans
Speaker 1: had had plenty of ways to torment and torture and
Speaker 1: mutilate the body, not trying to make them look good
Speaker 1: by parison, right, but for all their drawing and quartering
Speaker 1: and hanging and hacking and what have you, you really
Speaker 1: don't see much in the way of scalp taking in
Speaker 1: European tradition prior to this point, and even in even
Speaker 1: language itself, um so scalping as a word, the word
Speaker 1: itself scalp predates the seventeenth century. It arises from a
Speaker 1: scandin Navian Route and Uh and it was featured in
Speaker 1: a in a sixteen o one edition of Plenty of
Speaker 1: the Elder's Natural History, though the explorers in the New
Speaker 1: World tended to be unversed in Latin classics, so they
Speaker 1: probably weren't exposed to it now. Instead, such trophies were
Speaker 1: described as head skins or hair scalps. They just talked
Speaker 1: about skinning and flying um until scalps and scalping became
Speaker 1: a popular term in sixteen seventy six during King Phillip's
Speaker 1: War between Uh Native American tribes and the English colonists
Speaker 1: and their Native American allies. And meanwhile, there's a on
Speaker 1: the other hand, tho, there's a fairly robust vocabulary for
Speaker 1: scalps in many of the native tongues. The the Ojibwa
Speaker 1: language distinguishes between scalp and sioux scalp, and there's a
Speaker 1: separate word for each, while Eastern Abenaki language has special
Speaker 1: terminology for enemy scalps that are already taken, its trophies
Speaker 1: for scalps that could be taken, and scalps from the
Speaker 1: living and the dead so it's kind of like those
Speaker 1: uh the Old World where the old saying that Inuits
Speaker 1: have all these different words for snow. Because there's so
Speaker 1: much of it, you can make the the argument that
Speaker 1: the scalping was enough of the practice that there were uh,
Speaker 1: specific terms that were used in some of these cultures
Speaker 1: for specific types of scalps. Yes, but of course, as
Speaker 1: we see with the European invaders of the American continents, uh,
Speaker 1: they they had all of their own barbaric and violent practices,
Speaker 1: and even though scalping doesn't traditionally appear to be strongly
Speaker 1: represented among them, they took to it quite rapidly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could definitely say that. I mean they were kind
Speaker 1: of like, well, the way we did it back home
Speaker 1: is we just or a person into four pieces with horses.
Speaker 1: But hey, if you want to just take the scalp,
Speaker 1: we can do that too. Um. And that's the crazy part,
Speaker 1: because it's one thing to to look at these native
Speaker 1: tribes who had who had this in their culture and
Speaker 1: their tradition, and there may even be certain you know,
Speaker 1: supernatural elements that are factored into it, but the columnists
Speaker 1: had none of that. You just had a bunch of
Speaker 1: in most cases Protestants showing up in the New World
Speaker 1: and and readily getting into the act. Right, it's not
Speaker 1: a part of their traditional cultural war practice. It's more
Speaker 1: just sort of an adopted act of violence, and violence,
Speaker 1: of course becomes a standard in relations between columnists and
Speaker 1: the native inhabitants of the America's pretty much pretty much
Speaker 1: from inception, pretty much from that first outside context event
Speaker 1: when the two met, violence just continues to be a
Speaker 1: part of their history. Um and uh, And that's where
Speaker 1: the scalping really begins to to pick up. So it
Speaker 1: seems based on most accounts, all right, it's a pre
Speaker 1: existing thing that happens between tribe members in their tribal wars,
Speaker 1: often as as a way to take a trophy and
Speaker 1: then travel a long distance back with it, kind of
Speaker 1: getting back to the idea of taking the tail of
Speaker 1: a rat. Right. But then, uh, the Protestants, the colonials
Speaker 1: here they begin they begin to perpetuate the practice by
Speaker 1: putting putting a bounty, say ten shillings worth of truck
Speaker 1: cloth on native scalps, uh, that are taken by your
Speaker 1: native ally, So take the scalps from the enemy tribes
Speaker 1: people to people that we don't have alliances with and
Speaker 1: we will pay you in some cloth, all right. But
Speaker 1: then in the midst of Kings King Philip's War, which
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, which went from about six seventy eight,
Speaker 1: they extended the bounty to mercenaries thirty shillings per scalp um.
Speaker 1: And you you end up with plenty of horrific cases. There's, um,
Speaker 1: there's this case of Puritan kidnappy Hannah dustin uh She
Speaker 1: and her fellow kidnappies they were held by by by
Speaker 1: a band of tribespeople and then they escaped and they
Speaker 1: went on to execute two men to women in six children,
Speaker 1: and they received fifty pounds as a as a reward
Speaker 1: for that act. And there's actually a statue of this
Speaker 1: woman in uh Bosco in New Hampshire, just a statue
Speaker 1: of a murderer. Yeah, I mean, because that's it really
Speaker 1: kind of sums up the weird ways we we have
Speaker 1: historically made sense of this violence between these two people. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, talk about perverse incentives. So so you've got
Speaker 1: a rat bounty system where you assume, well, there's a
Speaker 1: rat problem, so we need to do something about it.
Speaker 1: So let's just collect rat tails and that will let
Speaker 1: us know there's at least some significant amount of rat
Speaker 1: killing going on. This seems like exactly the same principle
Speaker 1: being applied to human beings. Yeah, yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: the thing. We see this this bounty system spiral ever
Speaker 1: more out of control. Um, the French engaged in it,
Speaker 1: the English engaged in it, and it eventually becomes not
Speaker 1: only this thing that you're asking other tribes people to do, like, hey,
Speaker 1: you guys, take scalps, right, take the scalps of our
Speaker 1: enemies and will pay you. Scalps become the become a
Speaker 1: valuable item for for colonial individuals as well, hunters and trappers, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just evidence that you are carrying out the genocide
Speaker 1: that we're encouraging. Yeah. The first Massachusetts Act of sixteen
Speaker 1: ninety four encouraged a bounty for Indie any Indian life. Uh,
Speaker 1: while a seventeen or four renewal of that act amended
Speaker 1: it so you only got a hundred pounds for adults,
Speaker 1: ten pounds for children ten and older, and nothing for
Speaker 1: kids under ten, which sounds semi decent at first, and
Speaker 1: to realize that those children would be sold as slaves
Speaker 1: are transported out of the country. Now, as early as
Speaker 1: seventeen twelve, some folks were uneasy about that, And this
Speaker 1: is this is kind of a sobering thought to realize
Speaker 1: that not everybody was just completely on board with this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would hope not. I mean, this is straightforwardly encouraging
Speaker 1: a bounty for murder, right. I mean, though, at the
Speaker 1: same point, you have to acknowledge that, like this was
Speaker 1: a this was a tough time to be alive, Like
Speaker 1: it's there's a lot of fear going on in these
Speaker 1: communities and among these lawmakers. But but even even then,
Speaker 1: there were people who said, I'm not sure about this.
Speaker 1: Massachusetts Judge Samuel Sewell spoke in a session of the
Speaker 1: Massachusetts General Court and he said he he laid out
Speaker 1: that he really thought that that this was it was
Speaker 1: only okay. It should only be done if you're doing
Speaker 1: it to protect your family, and if it's becoming something
Speaker 1: that you're doing for commerce, then that's that's bad. Wait,
Speaker 1: so it's okay to murder a Native American and collect
Speaker 1: their scalp and turn it in for money, as long
Speaker 1: as the reason you did it wasn't the money so
Speaker 1: much that it was out of love for family. Yeah. Mean,
Speaker 1: that's just the basic Protestant ethos, right, that's the that's
Speaker 1: the the I'm kidding, but I mean, obviously that's the
Speaker 1: horrible situation here is that you have it becomes the practice,
Speaker 1: and then people have to people in positions of power
Speaker 1: and authority have to find ways to support it and
Speaker 1: rationalize it in their own mind. Yeah, but these rationalizations
Speaker 1: seem to becoming indirect conflict with the economic incentives being offered.
Speaker 1: If that's the case, why are you still offering the bounty? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. Um, and then it, uh, it gets ever
Speaker 1: more out of control there, especially when ministers are are
Speaker 1: speaking about it and they're not condemning it. There's this
Speaker 1: wonderful quote here from Actual Instruments Peace. It goes when
Speaker 1: ministers not only look the other way, but shared in
Speaker 1: the profits from Indian deaths. The moral barometer of America
Speaker 1: dipped dangerously low. At the bottom, however, lay the American Revolution,
Speaker 1: in which Englishmen scalped Englishmen in the name of liberty.
Speaker 1: Scalping and other techniques of Indian warfare placed in the
Speaker 1: hands of a larger European population eventually sealed the Indian's
Speaker 1: fate in North America, but not before wreaking upon the
Speaker 1: white man a subtle form of moral vengeance. So at
Speaker 1: this point, I think, when we think about the cobra
Speaker 1: effect in relation to scalping, is this an example of
Speaker 1: the cobra effects, right, Because on one hand, it's kind
Speaker 1: of doing exactly what the bounty is supposed to do,
Speaker 1: bringing about genocidal violence against the native population. Then again,
Speaker 1: I guess if you interpret the purpose of such a
Speaker 1: bounty on on Indian scalps as to be, I don't know,
Speaker 1: to pacify the border, you know, to make the frontier
Speaker 1: less bloody, you're obviously having a perverse incentive there. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're you're causing murderous havoc, right. And there are plenty
Speaker 1: of examples to where the scalp trade just intensifies the violence. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you end up with uh, with with various native
Speaker 1: chiefs in some cases who are putting bounties then for
Speaker 1: their own people upon the white man. And and so
Speaker 1: you have this this kind of a war of extermination
Speaker 1: from both sides. There are examples, um, some of the
Speaker 1: like in the Mexican examples will get to in a
Speaker 1: second where Galton and his gang in that specifically, they
Speaker 1: would roll into an area and violence would just intensify
Speaker 1: because they're just stirring up all of this hatred. So,
Speaker 1: of course scalp hunting continued, um and uh, and falsified
Speaker 1: scalping also pops up as an inevitability weight. So maybe
Speaker 1: just like collecting pigtails from a meat processing plant and saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: I shot all these pigs, you might have people getting
Speaker 1: scalps or parts of scalps from illicit sources, a sort
Speaker 1: of yeah, there's a there's a quote that I ran
Speaker 1: across these materials from nineteenth century American historian Francis Parkman,
Speaker 1: and he said the hunting of humans would constitute at
Speaker 1: profitable occupation if only the prey was not so shy
Speaker 1: and nimble. So I mean, well, you can't just with
Speaker 1: the rats. You can just raise them, right, and rats
Speaker 1: are everywhere. People are can prove a little harder to kill,
Speaker 1: even if you're a ruthless gang of mercenaries roving about,
Speaker 1: and people are gonna inevitably to figure out how can
Speaker 1: I get the most out of this kill? Uh? If
Speaker 1: you would read this next quote to for us, it
Speaker 1: comes from twentieth century German ethnologist of European colonization George Frederici. Okay,
Speaker 1: it says this, along with the high profits of the
Speaker 1: fatal business, soon taught the shrewd tribes people and their
Speaker 1: quick learning students, the lawless backwoodsmen and hunters the art
Speaker 1: of skillfully making two, three, or even more scalps from
Speaker 1: one scalp and selling them. People were not always very
Speaker 1: particular about where the scalp came from because it was
Speaker 1: difficult or impossible to distinguish between a French scalp and
Speaker 1: an English one. Members of friendly tribes and even fellow
Speaker 1: countrymen fell victim to greed and the scalping knife. Not
Speaker 1: even the dead were spared. Yeah, so you could. This
Speaker 1: is interesting. It goes even beyond what what what Ferci
Speaker 1: was talking about here, because you could apparently take a
Speaker 1: single adult scalp, you could stretch it as you dried
Speaker 1: it out, and you could cut it into a dozen
Speaker 1: different things that you could pass off or try to
Speaker 1: pass off as scalps, which is is quite You can
Speaker 1: see the financial possibilities there. This is one of those
Speaker 1: moments where it comes up every now and then you
Speaker 1: just imagine aliens coming in and observing our behavior, and
Speaker 1: they're seeing somebody take the skin off the top of
Speaker 1: another human's head and stretch it and cut it into
Speaker 1: a bunch of pieces. Yeah. Yeah, And it became such
Speaker 1: a problem in Mexico where you had the Mexican States,
Speaker 1: they're paying mercenaries to go around and hunt for scalps um.
Speaker 1: They had to demand that scalps include one or both
Speaker 1: ears or the crown, and they even set up regulatory committees.
Speaker 1: But the thing here is that and I guess you
Speaker 1: kind of have to put yourself in their their their shoes,
Speaker 1: or try to imagine the kind of individual who ends
Speaker 1: up taking the job as a scalp inspector. Uh. Your
Speaker 1: job is to inspect these grizzly trophies of of human
Speaker 1: murder and genocide. Uh, and then uh, you know, reject
Speaker 1: it if it's the wrong type of scalp, or if
Speaker 1: it's been falsified. Apparently they were easily bought off and
Speaker 1: you gelt to so you just bribe them, and then
Speaker 1: they'll accept a child scalp as an adult. And therefore,
Speaker 1: you know, there's even more incentive to kill a bunch
Speaker 1: of children. And that's exactly uh, the type of behavior
Speaker 1: you saw from individuals such as John Glanton earlier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we said Galton, but it was Glanton, the Glanton Gang.
Speaker 1: I think I had him confused with the The Eagles
Speaker 1: song about the Dalton's very different view of the American West.
Speaker 1: But still, the scalp trade continued, and in many cases
Speaker 1: it seemed to escalate and uh So, like July fourteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, in response to raids by Dakota in southern Minnesota,
Speaker 1: the state issued twenty five dollar bonus pavements to scalps
Speaker 1: who brought back a scalp a hundred dollars for non soldiers,
Speaker 1: and this later hit two hundred bucks. So, needless to say,
Speaker 1: a lot of scalping ensued. Uh And in between eighteen
Speaker 1: thirty five and the eighteen eighties, Mexican authorities, as we
Speaker 1: already mentioned, they paid private armies to hunt Native Americans,
Speaker 1: specifically targeting apaches and comanches. And I always find the
Speaker 1: inclusion of comanches, um and stuff like this to be
Speaker 1: interesting because the comanches in large part were um you know,
Speaker 1: there were the people of the horse. And where did
Speaker 1: they get this horse technology, this biotechnology? They got it
Speaker 1: from the Spanish who introduced the Horse into North America. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you you know, they encountered this this outside context problem.
Speaker 1: They survived it and and really became the the notorious
Speaker 1: uh warring people of the Horse because of our interference. Um.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of that's kind of a step to tangent.
Speaker 1: But commanding history is very, very fascinating. But wherever these
Speaker 1: uh these bounties persisted, you just saw genocidal violence persist,
Speaker 1: and it really really continued until the balance was successfully
Speaker 1: tipped completely in favor of the colonials, and then was
Speaker 1: replaced by new uh anti native activities such as relocation
Speaker 1: programs and re education centers, so that the horrible history
Speaker 1: um did not stop there by any means. So, in
Speaker 1: one sense, this might not be an example of cobra
Speaker 1: effect at all. If you just as we said, think
Speaker 1: of the the ultimate goal of the Scalp Bounty as being, well,
Speaker 1: just where we want to exterminate the people who live
Speaker 1: here so we can make room to uh to occupy
Speaker 1: the land ourselves. It seems like that's sort of worked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, the the unintended consequence, if there is one here,
Speaker 1: aside from having to deal with with individuals who are
Speaker 1: falsilvank scalps and and getting more money than they should have.
Speaker 1: Um is just the like the backwash of bloodshed and
Speaker 1: the fact that we just the idea that the that
Speaker 1: the colonists bloodied themselves, bloodied their souls and really just
Speaker 1: created this this stain of shame for all time. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: perhaps we should leave the realm of scalp hunting, human
Speaker 1: bounties and genocide and and uh come back to the
Speaker 1: idea of uh backfiring incentives in general. Yeah, let's send
Speaker 1: it on a lighter note. All right, now, Robert, I
Speaker 1: want to talk about the idea of negative incentives. So
Speaker 1: we've seen the idea that positive incentives can backfire. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they backfire in just ways that produce unintended negative consequences.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they backfire in a way that completely contradicts your
Speaker 1: intention setting out, you know, makes the problem worse. But
Speaker 1: there are also negative incentives. Sometimes you want to take
Speaker 1: steps to prevent something from happening and discourage it. But
Speaker 1: what about when that may the thing you're trying to
Speaker 1: discourage more likely to happen. Here's one model. What if
Speaker 1: a punishment for a discouraged behavior itself becomes desirable in
Speaker 1: some way, especially like a symbol of coolness. So I
Speaker 1: can think of one good potential example of this, and
Speaker 1: there's a New York Times article from two thousand seven
Speaker 1: I came across describing a problem within the Bangkok Police
Speaker 1: Department at the time. So department officials were, according to
Speaker 1: this article, trying to put a stop to misbehavior among
Speaker 1: the rank and file officers. So if you park in
Speaker 1: the wrong spot, if you show up for work late,
Speaker 1: if you get caught littering, etcetera. You know, there's some
Speaker 1: bad behavior among the cops and they're trying to disincentivize it.
Speaker 1: And the disincentive they came up with to stop this
Speaker 1: behavior was a form of a badge of shame, you know,
Speaker 1: like the red letter. You get to wear something that
Speaker 1: lets people know that you have paved badly, and what
Speaker 1: they chose was a tartan arm band. Unfortunately, this policy
Speaker 1: seemed to backfire, and the officers ended up regarding the
Speaker 1: disciplinary arm bands as collectible souvenirs to take home with them,
Speaker 1: So the badge of shame became a minor badge of honor,
Speaker 1: and in in trying to work around this problem, they're
Speaker 1: there Chief of the crime Suppression division at the time
Speaker 1: came up with uh, Instead of Tartan arm bands, they
Speaker 1: used these Hello Kitty arm bands, hoping this would be
Speaker 1: seen as sort of a humiliating affront to the officer's
Speaker 1: sense of power and masculinity. I'm not sure how well
Speaker 1: that worked out in the end, but anyway, this one
Speaker 1: very small example illustrates the principle that a poorly conceived
Speaker 1: disincentive can not only fail to provide discouragement of a
Speaker 1: target behavior, it could potentially even increase the behavior if
Speaker 1: the disincentive comes to be seen as having some kind
Speaker 1: of value. Now, maybe that could be some kind of
Speaker 1: mono terry or material value, or maybe it could just
Speaker 1: be some kind of cred or social capital coolness. Okay,
Speaker 1: there's certainly a sense of countercultural coolness, right, you know,
Speaker 1: like if if a certain kind of shaming can be
Speaker 1: taken with pride. Yeah, like, oh, it's too extreme for TV,
Speaker 1: too hot for for prime time. It's too hot for
Speaker 1: prime time. I've got to see it. How hot could
Speaker 1: this be? Right? But then, of course, there are also
Speaker 1: examples where you could maybe have a material advantage. For example,
Speaker 1: I think I think about supposed tax schemes that reward
Speaker 1: people for making failed business investments, you know, supposedly like
Speaker 1: you can you can if you finance a really bad
Speaker 1: movie that bombs or something, you can end up manipulating
Speaker 1: your taxes in such a way that you end up
Speaker 1: with more money because the thing you financed bombed. Kind
Speaker 1: of a producer's scenario, right, Yeah, exactly. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's really the case in any country today, but
Speaker 1: I've at least heard accusations that that is how some
Speaker 1: very bad films of the past few decades got financing.
Speaker 1: Don't know whether it's true. But there's another version of
Speaker 1: this I want to talk about, and that is the
Speaker 1: case of censorship. I think censorship is a classic example
Speaker 1: of attempts to stop a problem causing the opposite of
Speaker 1: the intended effect of the problem. Is there is a
Speaker 1: message or a meme or an idea or you know,
Speaker 1: anything that is spreading content that you don't want disseminated,
Speaker 1: and attempting to stop the dissemination of that content very
Speaker 1: very often seems to have the opposite of the intended effect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just makes you want to see it or hear
Speaker 1: it or read it. If the man is telling me
Speaker 1: not to consume it. I kind of want to consume it,
Speaker 1: at least to see what the fuss is all about exactly.
Speaker 1: So there is a I found a Mercury News article
Speaker 1: from way back in two thousand three describing the event
Speaker 1: that inspired what's now known as the Streisand Effect. I
Speaker 1: assume you've heard of this, Robbert. I had not. Actually
Speaker 1: I'm familiar with Barber Streisand but I wasn't familiar with
Speaker 1: the Streisand Effect. Well, that is indeed the title celebrity
Speaker 1: behind this effect. So here's how the story went. So
Speaker 1: there's an environmentalist photographer named Ken Edelman, not the same
Speaker 1: as the political operative, but he was operating a website
Speaker 1: that I think at the time was called California Coastline
Speaker 1: dot org. California coastline dot org dot org is still
Speaker 1: up I checked. And the purpose of this was to
Speaker 1: photograph many, many miles of the California coast to have
Speaker 1: before and after pictures of coastal development projects to tract
Speaker 1: sort of coastline erosion and other potentially destructive effects of
Speaker 1: building projects along the coast. So it's almost kind of
Speaker 1: like a Google Maps scenario where they're just gonna take
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of pictures to give an overall visual
Speaker 1: impression of something. Yeah, And I think the reasoning was that,
Speaker 1: so if you know you have a project come in
Speaker 1: build a bunch of stuff on the coast, you might
Speaker 1: think that they have been destructive to the coastal ecosystem,
Speaker 1: But you don't exactly know because you don't have a
Speaker 1: picture of what it looked like before they build. But
Speaker 1: now you've got before and after photos. But apparently in
Speaker 1: two thousand three, the actress Barbara Streisand discovered that the
Speaker 1: site featured a photograph of her ocean front home in Malibu,
Speaker 1: and she felt this was an invasion of her privacy
Speaker 1: and filed a ten million dollar lawsuit to to have
Speaker 1: the photograph and references to her removed from the site
Speaker 1: or taken down. And before her lawsuit, it appears that
Speaker 1: the photo of her home was not not a big hit.
Speaker 1: It was accessed by only a handful of site visitors.
Speaker 1: But in the month after the suit was filed, according
Speaker 1: to this two thousand three article, more than four hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty thousand people visited the California coast Line site,
Speaker 1: presumably to see what all the fuss was about. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know what their traffic was before that month.
Speaker 1: It was a you know, coastal Coastal Photographs project in
Speaker 1: two thousand three. I can guess that it was not
Speaker 1: anywhere near food visitors. Yeah, probably only the hottest websites
Speaker 1: out there, right, So, Yeah, that's one example. But are
Speaker 1: there any other examples of this strisand effect where the
Speaker 1: attempt to shut down discussion or or to hide evidence
Speaker 1: of something just draws more and more attention to it.
Speaker 1: I can definitely think of the example of Boycott's movie boycotts.
Speaker 1: So let's say we've got a new awesome demonic possession
Speaker 1: movie coming out, and it's got tons of graphics, sex
Speaker 1: and violence and blasphemy, just wall to wall, and you
Speaker 1: get a bunch of church groups who call for a
Speaker 1: boycott of the film. They go stand outside theaters to
Speaker 1: protest it. Does this end up hurting the film's ticket
Speaker 1: sales or discouraging filmmakers from making movies like this in
Speaker 1: the future. Well, it's almost impossible to say, because you
Speaker 1: can't go back in time and compare the film success
Speaker 1: under a boycott and protest with the success of the
Speaker 1: same film under normal conditions like you can't run the
Speaker 1: experiment with the control it happened in reality, um, and
Speaker 1: there's no way to control the experiment, but it is
Speaker 1: widely speculated and I'm quite sure I'd agree that these
Speaker 1: kinds of responses more often have the opposite of the
Speaker 1: intended effect, generating more publicity for an interest in the movie. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 1: I can definitely think of films that were considered video
Speaker 1: nasties in the UK that we became underground hits and
Speaker 1: we're the kind of things you go to kind of
Speaker 1: great links to get on video caauseet back in the day. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you look at them today now that kind of
Speaker 1: you know, you can get anything. You can actually find
Speaker 1: these films that you heard about and having such notorious histories,
Speaker 1: and you you watch them. In many cases they're just
Speaker 1: they're they're horrible, They're it's just nothing. They're not even
Speaker 1: that shocking. But the mere fact that they were labeled
Speaker 1: as such, that they were banned, that they were prohibited
Speaker 1: and made this video nasties list, they they end up surviving,
Speaker 1: They end up becoming far more famous than they had
Speaker 1: any right to be. Yeah. Uh yeah. The insistence that
Speaker 1: you must not look at a thing really increases your curiosity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's plenty of people today who are seeking
Speaker 1: out and watching some really terrible, low budget Italian horror
Speaker 1: films and finding themselves very disappointed because they don't match
Speaker 1: up to the reputation they had acquired over the years.
Speaker 1: So here's the idea I have about how to how
Speaker 1: to turn the strisand effect into money. Okay, Uh, if
Speaker 1: there aren't marketing and pr firms that already specialize in this,
Speaker 1: I suspect actually maybe there are, we just don't know
Speaker 1: about them. There should be, and what they should do
Speaker 1: is you come to them with a movie or you know,
Speaker 1: any kind of media property that you're trying to generate
Speaker 1: interest in, and what they do is put that thing
Speaker 1: in front of people who they know will hate it,
Speaker 1: and our activists in nature who start to generate a
Speaker 1: boycotting or censoring, calling for censorship kind of reaction to it,
Speaker 1: and then that of course draws in you know, all
Speaker 1: this curiosity. Oh, people are saying, well, I shouldn't look
Speaker 1: at this thing. I wonder what it is. So you're saying,
Speaker 1: send out screeners of the exorcism film. You're talking about
Speaker 1: two church groups yeah, to to whoever's the most conservative
Speaker 1: and censorious person who would hate it, or you could
Speaker 1: do it the other way around. Really you could be
Speaker 1: uh I guess use using something that would be offensive
Speaker 1: to any group, and almost anything might be offensive to somebody, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I can. I can think of several cases,
Speaker 1: none of I'm not going to mention any of their
Speaker 1: names because they don't deserve any more publicity. But there
Speaker 1: are several individuals who have who you know, continue to
Speaker 1: seek out that notoriety for their creations, to create things
Speaker 1: purely to just sicken and piss people off, and that
Speaker 1: that's there the whole appeal. Like that you're thinking about
Speaker 1: a film about a mini segmented creature. Uh, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: one that comes to mind, Like that's I think that's
Speaker 1: a clear case of a guy who like, there's nothing
Speaker 1: at the heart of anything. There's nothing artistically pure, there's
Speaker 1: nothing creative, there's nothing nothing even fun, not nothing fun
Speaker 1: or even all that shocking per se. In a grander scheme,
Speaker 1: there's certainly more shocking pieces of cinema out there that
Speaker 1: have been created by by by actual artists, but it's
Speaker 1: just the storm that they're able to to to raise
Speaker 1: up around those creations, and then make it like a
Speaker 1: part of our culture, you know, just empty cynical bids
Speaker 1: for attention. Yeah exactly. But yeah, So I think the
Speaker 1: takeaway from this is that there does seem to be
Speaker 1: almost no surer way to draw attention to something than
Speaker 1: to try to prevent people from seeing it, almost like
Speaker 1: any attempt to manipulate the attention that we give to
Speaker 1: something being negative or positive. Like it's just it's so easy,
Speaker 1: Like we think that it's going to be easy to
Speaker 1: economically manipulate something or even you know, through censorship, manipulate
Speaker 1: the scenario, manipulate the way we interact with something. But
Speaker 1: it's just such a complicated affair. It's just we're gonna,
Speaker 1: we're gonna overfloak the tub either way. I think people
Speaker 1: do just have a sort of contrarian nature where we
Speaker 1: want to try to uh, upset the narrative of the
Speaker 1: institutional authority. I think about this with so the strisand
Speaker 1: effect definitely occurs with brands. You know, you'll have a
Speaker 1: an article or a meme or something like that that
Speaker 1: makes Coca Cola or Pepsi or McDonald's or something look
Speaker 1: bad and they'll they'll try to shut it down, you know,
Speaker 1: no more than this, and that just doesn't work, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just draws more attention to it. And it especially
Speaker 1: happens when you see these uh you know, these like
Speaker 1: social media crowdsourcing message campaigns, Like I can't remember what
Speaker 1: any of these hashtags are, but you know what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. It'll be like hashtag uh coke feelings, and
Speaker 1: Coca Cola is trying to get you to do free
Speaker 1: advertising for them on your social media page. But of
Speaker 1: course people respond into it with stuff, you know, diabetes
Speaker 1: or whatever. And I can just tell any time a
Speaker 1: brand tries to shut down those sort of mischievous responses
Speaker 1: to their campaign, they're just going to make people want
Speaker 1: to do it more. Yeah. Indeed, you see that almost
Speaker 1: on a weekly basis these days. Yeah. All right, So
Speaker 1: there you have it. We went from cobras and rats
Speaker 1: and pigs to the horrors of scalp hunting, and then
Speaker 1: back into the world of censorship. Um. So hopefully we
Speaker 1: gave you a lot to consider in terms of the
Speaker 1: cobra effect here. I think this makes me want to
Speaker 1: hear what your thoughts are you out there? The listener
Speaker 1: what what your thoughts are about the nature of incentives?
Speaker 1: How do you actually guide people's behavior in a reliable
Speaker 1: way that doesn't produce these unintended and perverse consequences? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean really, we can hear from just about anybody
Speaker 1: on this. Are you a pet owner? Are you a parent?
Speaker 1: Are you a boss? Are you at all involved in
Speaker 1: or at least a close follower of a politics? Are
Speaker 1: you a government policymaker? Yeah? Yeah? What happens when you
Speaker 1: start trying to push an issue with a you know,
Speaker 1: stick with some money stuck on the end of it, Uh,
Speaker 1: to get the results you need? Let us know. I'm
Speaker 1: sure some carrots work better than others. Yeah. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: so many different types of carrots, so many different types
Speaker 1: of sticks. Sometimes you just end up with no carrots
Speaker 1: or a horse that likes to be poked with the stick.
Speaker 1: I don't know how do we get that? Okay? Sorry? Alright?
Speaker 1: So hey, you wanna you wanna get in touch with us,
Speaker 1: you want to share your thoughts on this topic or others.
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