The Cobra Effect

From Wikipedia:

“The term cobra effect originated in an anecdote that describes an occurrence during India under British rule. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi. The government therefore offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.”

More about Metrics from Jakob Greenfield:

Stagnation apologists love to argue that the lack of progress in science is simply a result of the fact that all low-hanging fruit are gone.

That’s complete nonsense. There’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit. It’s just that everyone is so busy chasing meaningless metrics that they can’t see them.

In academia the metric of choice usually has something to do with the number of citations. But just like Google’s backlink-driven algorithm (which was in fact inspired by academia’s citation metrics) was quickly gamed by savvy webmasters, academia’s algorithm is gamed by careerists.

And I’m not talking about some tiny minority here. If you want to survive in academia, you have to play the citation game. And if everyone is cheating, at the very least you have to do the same to stand a chance.

You have to partner up with others because five people can write five times as many papers. You agree to constantly cite each other. Likewise, you focus on incremental additions to established ideas because that’s the safest way to new publications regularly. You work on the stuff everyone else is working on because how else are you going to get citations?

And one thing you absolutely have to avoid like the plague is the risky and deep kind of research that leads to real progress in the field.

The problem isn’t that citations are a bad metric, and we need to come up with smarter ones. Instead, it’s just Goodhart’s law in action. Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse.