The term cobra effect originated in an anecdote set at the time of British rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number of venomous cobra snakes in Delhi. The government therefore offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially this was a successful strategy as 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, causing the cobra breeders to set the now-worthless snakes free. As a result, the wild cobra population further increased. The apparent solution for the problem made the situation even worse.
Chesterton’s fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled “The Drift from Domesticity”:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
There was a Buddhist monastery up in the mountains. Every day at noon the head monk would call everyone together in the main courtyard to meditate.
One day a cat that lived on the monastery grounds started to come to the courtyard during these meditation sessions. It would screech at, and scratch the monks while they tried to concentrate.
After a few weeks the head monk got tired of this. He ordered that every day before they meditate, the cat be caught. They tied up the cat away from the main court yard. After meditation the cat was to be released.
This went on for a few years and everything was fine. Then the head monk passed away. A new monk was appointed.
A few more after that the cat passed away. The monks retrieved a new cat from a nearby village and they started typing up this new cat; as is tradition.
The hundredth monkey effect is a hypothetical phenomenon in which a new behaviour or idea is claimed to spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behaviour or acknowledge the new idea.
One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the story is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources which have themselves misrepresented the original observations.
A behavioural study was conducted in the 1950’s of a troupe of Macaca fuscata (Japanese monkeys) on Kōjima island. An unanticipated byproduct of the study was that the scientists witnessed several evolutionary behavioural changes by the troupe, two of which were orchestrated by one young female, and the others by her sibling or contemporaries.
The account of only one of these behavioural changes (sweet potato washing) was propagated into a phenomenon and the story loosely published by Lawrence Blair and Lyall Watson in the mid-to-late 1970s.
The second-system effect (also known as second-system syndrome) is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems, to be succeeded by over-engineered, bloated systems, due to inflated expectations and overconfidence.
The phrase was first used by Fred Brooks in his book The Mythical Man-Month, first published in 1975. It described the jump from a set of simple operating systems on the IBM 700/7000 series to OS/360 on the 360 series, which happened in 1964.
Greenspun’s tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states:
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp… including Common Lisp itself.
Zawinski’s law of software envelopment (also known as Zawinski’s law) comments on the phenomenon of software bloating with popular features:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Zawinski himself called it the “Law of Software Envelopment”. Eric S. Raymond commented that while this law goes against the minimalist philosophy of Unix (a set of “small, sharp tools”), it actually addresses the real need of end users to keep together tools for interrelated tasks, even though for a coder implementation of these tools clearly consists of independent jobs.
Primum non nocere (Classical Latin: [ˈpriːmʊ̃n noːn nɔˈkeːrɛ]) is a Latin phrase that means “first, to do no harm.” The phrase is sometimes recorded as primum nil nocere.
Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all medical students are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that:
Given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good.
It reminds physicians to consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit.
Goodhart’s law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
One way in which this can occur is individuals trying to anticipate the effect of a policy and then taking actions that alter its outcome.
Campbell’s law is an adage developed by Donald T. Campbell, a psychologist and social scientist who often wrote about research methodology, which states:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
As applied to education, Campbell also wrote: “Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways — similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations”.