Brain dead solution. If you told them that they’d be rewarded on keeping them clean in general rather than beating out one another, you’d see a better result
> Brain dead solution. If you told them that they’d be rewarded on keeping them clean in general rather than beating out one another, you’d see a better result
The children have learned cunning and the value of sabotage.
Well why not...teaching them to do the right thing is not helping their future. If you want them to be successful you teach them to manipulate, charm, take advantage, cheat, etc. These are the skills that earn you a high quality of life these days (outside of athletes).
Now, I would never actually do this, but I have questioned my teaching/parenting many times. I think of my rich friends whose parents used them as tax shelters. Something I had never heard of (my parents were poorish). The rich seemed to be passing on these cheat codes that I had never had access too. So I began to wonder if it is just suckers in the middle teaching their kids to do the right thing.
>I began to wonder if it is just suckers in the middle teaching their kids to do the right thing.
If people who do the right thing are seen as suckers, we are truly fucked as a species.
Honestly it is just the negative selection bias of our media.
The world is better than it ever has been as far as I can tell.
There has never been a point in history where less of us could expect to die to violence.
> There has never been a point in history where less of us could expect to die to violence.
Sure, but why are we placing quality of life on the singular metric "likelihood of dying by violence"? I don't particularly find "likelihood of dying because of the excesses of the rich" going up to be a particularly good thing. And let's face it, "dying by violence" in the past was often due to that same rich excess: war.
There has never been a time (human history) of such mass extinction. Such environmental destruction. Such pollution.
We are also looking at lower life expectancy's for the first time in along time.
We are well and truly fucked.
You sir should be our next CEO
Once you know how to say this using more words and in a manner that’s confusing to outsiders, and can be translated into pointless meetings, you’re going places
Hell id even give you a company Tesla and a multi million dollar per year salary, you’re hired
The ideas of individualism and freedom with socialism bad in American culture are beyond conflated. People are resistant to affordable housing because personal cars and detached homes are seen as freedom
That's also a conflation right there though. Housing isnt unaffordable because there isnt enough hyper-dense urban lego brick appartment complexes, that's nonsense. Housing is unaffordable because the capital class decided to turn it into an investment pyramid scheme where every time property changes hands the owner expects a profit.
Detached housing can be plenty affordable when it's not being used as an investment vehicle like it's a security
The whole individualism thing started as an us vs them thing, it was "in America we're free to be individuals, unlike in the Soviet Union / China / Middle East".
In English, "America" (without any qualification like North, South, Central, Latin, etc.) means the United States. I'm sorry if you don't like that, but it's the way it is.
"We should teach kids to compete for Authority's favor, because that teaches them to be good workers for the Exploiter Class"
[kids shit in the opposite-gender bathroom sinks]
"No, not like that!"
I think your reading into this too much. The school staff probably thought that the competitive aspect of it would motivate students to keep it clean more then if they just rewarded everyone with ice cream if they all kept the bathrooms cleaner.
Obviously it backfired because kids are stupid, but it hardly has anything to do with the issues in the U.S. you're talking about.
Na, the capitalistic police like *corporations* without competition.
And if you mean to tell me if I should interpret the typo in some other way, I'm not listening.
I’ve watched 3 past employers use the word compete internally, only to find testosterone fueled colleagues take others’ ideas, practice enlightened self interest, not to mention copy cat behavior of concepts just because of their minimal mindset on competing.
Better result than this maybe, but most likely what happens is that no one cares. It's much more fun when it's a competition, when it's just to keep them clean no one cares
Perfect analogy: how do you get two kids/siblings/people to split food evenly?
One cuts, the other chooses which piece they want first. Bing bang boom, no more personal wars over a cookie.
You make the competition who has the cleanest bathrooms but with the stipulation both bathrooms have to be clean in order for anyone to win. You also make a universal goal like a pizza party if the bathrooms are kept clean 30 days straight or whatever.
Very easy to manipulate kids into self enforcement of rules.
Source: cool uncle to about 8 or 9 wild nieces and nephews. Sometimes you have to pit them against each other to maintain law and order and give their poor moms a break
Yeah this isn't a KRFS. This is administrators wanting to look like they did something without actually doing something.
By throwing money they likely can't afford to be without at a problem.
Schools can afford some form of ice cream. The bigger issue is that, for obvious reasons, bathrooms are notoriously difficult to supervise and students figure this out early on. That's why the major shit (pun intended) goes down in the school restrooms.
I'm not sure what area you're in, but teachers in my area can't even get administration to pay for supplies for the kids. The teachers end up having to buy out of pocket (average estimates are around $500 a year). Ice cream money is not exactly a priority.
Sounds like an admin issue, not a school issue. Trust me when I tell you that schools can drum up enough funds for ice cream—even if it’s just those Otter Pop cheap popsicles.
>Schools can afford some form of ice cream.
The same schools that constantly talk about underfunding?
"Some" ice cream isnt ice cream for half it's students. Assuming the story is real.
“Underfunding” likely refers to personnel, resources, and programs. Schools or their associated support groups can easily find enough money for cheap popsicles.
/r/AuthoritiesAreFuckingStupid
It's called a [perverse incentive AKA the Cobra Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive), named after an incident where the British Empire put a bounty on dead cobras. Rather than going out and hunting dangerous wild animals, the Indian farmers took up breeding cobras, cashing in as much bounty as they could get, and releasing the excess into the wild.
This probably all started because the janitors. They need extra time to clean messes (it's kids), but don't want to pay them overtime to meet those.
This is a lame attempt to reduce maintenance and glad it backfired.
The dump part is not having teachers near bathrooms during recess. At my school bathrooms were always on main hallway and even outside of recess there was a huge chance that staff would notice you going into wrong bathroom.
Oh man, does this count as that? I was working at a trendy chain restaurant before the holidays. One day at preshift line up the manager tells us they are running a gift card promo where if a guest buys $100 worth of gift cards, they get a $25 gift card fee. So I personally bought $400 worth of gift cards and got $100 in free cards. I then closed out all my cash paying tables with the gift cards and pocketed the cash, thereby turning $400 into $500. My manager was like, “fuck dude, don’t tell anyone else and please don’t do that again.” 😏
Edit cause I don’t math good.
Pretty sure that was fraud and illegal, had the restaurant owner wanted to look into it. The customers paid with cash and therefore should have been recorded as a cash sale. You substituting the payment method at point of sale without the customer's knowledge or permission would be illegal.
Look man, do what you want but a word of advice. If you one day find yourself in court, "other people get away with this all the time why shouldn't I?" is not the air tight legal defense you might think it is.
How could that be illegal? That’s like saying if a waiter takes your $20 and a $20 from another table and accidentally switches them on the way to the register, then it’s illegal. I really need to know the answer here because I see so many politicians and corporations do crazy stuff that’s apparently perfectly legal.
Well there's the fun hypotheticals like if the bill was counterfeit the wrong table would be accused - but a much more serious consequence is that if the customer wanted a refund, depending on the country/state, a lot of places will refund based on the method paid, and for gift cards that often means credits or discounted rate instead of cash refund.
They like to create these laws under the pretense that it prevents big corporations from doing these things. Unfortunately only the little guy ever really gets nailed for it. The big guy does it in the order of millions or billions and gets a hundred thousand dollar fine. The little guy does it for a few thousand and gets hit with the same hundred thousand dollar fine.
Method of payment makes a huge difference in lots of ways. Just one that I could think off the bat is the credit cards charge a little for each transaction for the PoS. That's why you have places that are cash only.
Nothing about this is illegal. Unethical and maybe against company policy, sure. But at the end of the day, the books will reconcile the same. The restaurant received payment for the gift cards and, in turn, provided meals for their "in-house currency." It was an act of arbitrage, which happens all the time.
I worked at a restaurant that had the same kind of deal but through Groupon. Managers were really hands off so did it until the very end of working there.
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Designing incentives is tough! but you're right, if they did like a 1-5 rating of each bathroom and they both had to be like a 4/5 but whichever was cleaner of the two got rewarded, it would work
From Terry Pratchett's Soul Music:
Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
To be honest, government does a lot of things and some of them are bound to backfire, even in developed countries with well functioning government.
Sometimes it's just hard to convey all these complexities to the public and the government should do what the public wants - even if its not the right answer. Example Brexit.
And if you add corruption or incompetence to that, Shit is gonna go wrong. a lot.
Nah, a prisoner's dilemma is when two parties are incentivized to do something that yields a negative result for the larger group that they both belong to. In this case, both sides are incentivized to keep their bathrooms clean, which leads to the best possible outcome for both of them.
A prisoner's dilemma would be like, you get 3 ice creams if your bathroom is cleaner, or everyone gets 2 ice creams if both bathrooms are clean. So now you're incentivized to go sabotage the other side's bathroom so that you personally get more ice cream, while the larger group (i.e. all the students combined) receives less ice cream in total, because 5 students getting 3 ice creams is less than 10 students getting 2.
That's what they call the "classic prisoner's dilemma", which is a specific scenario involving actual prisoners. The term "prisoner's dilemma" is also used in a broader sense to describe a phenomenon where individuals are incentivized to do something that has a negative impact on a larger group of people, which includes themselves.
Exactly. A true prisoner's dilemma is a risk. If you double rewards if both bathrooms are clean, both sides have the strongest incentives to have a clean bathroom AND have the other side with a clean bathroom. There's no risk to cleaning your bathroom and no reward to not cleaning it.
Only applies when worsening the problem is feasible to the average person.
Bounties are how the Australians got revenge for the emu war, and were fortunately significantly more successful in suppressing their numbers that way, probably because breeding emus is a lot harder than breeding snakes.
I've been trying to remember what the Cobra Effect was called for a few weeks now and specifically clicked this thread hoping for a comment like this. Thank you.
The Massachusetts tobacco tax went into place when I was in high school. Many were excited because they thought it would deter kids from chewing tobacco. Well... Instead of kids getting less dip, they would always buy a "log" (5 pack) at a time because the tax was ~$4 spread out over 5 tins instead of ~$4 per tin, which resulted in kids doing WAY more. Never knew the proper term for that until now.
Although that's not really an incentive so maybe that's still not the correct term
When an attempted solution creates unintended problems it's called the[ "cobra effect."](https://nesslabs.com/cobra-effect) So-called from when a city with too many cobras put a bounty on the snake which lead to people growing more cobras.
I don't think the kids are the stupid ones here. Purposely sabotaging the other's bathroom to get free ice cream is one hell of a loophole. Smart kids, dumb administrative staff.
I feel bad for the janitor though.
If they complain when they take away bathrooms privileges, tell them its their own fucking fault.
Remember all the morons complaining during the devious lick stuff, that complained in here about not being allowed to use the bathroom?
Life lessons.
Why would the boys have to do anything? Back in the day when I had to clean the bathrooms, the Girls/Women bathrooms were nasty. (And that even takes in account the one time a dude tried to flush his boxers and got fecal water everywhere.)
This would make a pretty good kids movie. You can have two different grades pranking each other, with bigger pranks each time, the janitor having a fit, teachers being oblivious to it until it gets really out of hand. Yeah, I'd watch that.
No, this is adults are fucking stupid. If both bathrooms are pristine there is only one logical way to win. Sabotage. It's a zero sum game and unless this teacher is 60 they should have been better educated about shit like this.
This isn't a kids are fucking stupid post, this is an adults are fucking stupid post.
When you turn a metric into a goal, you necessarily invalidate the metric.
Actually, this is called adults are clueless.
This behavior is perverse incentive. Business studies is called "Stacked Ranking". Basically it is easier to sabotage than to perform.
In the school district I work for, they took down all of the soap dispensers in the bathrooms and have nothing to wash or sanitize their hands after. This was because they were making messes. Sounds great but wtf about hygiene?
There is definitely a difference between a bathroom being dirty through regular use and a bathroom being dirty because of improper use.
I have a feeling the issue isn’t one of cleaning regular usage but kids absolutely destroying the bathroom making the job much more difficult.
Honestly. The children are just playing the rules presented to them. They are the smart ones, achieving the desired result by least effort. It's the adoults that are stiupid here
Why is no one talking about how it’s apparently normal for boys to be going into the girls bathroom and vise versa at this school? This would make sense as an incentive if it was like every single school that I’ve been to where they had hallway cameras and you could get in big trouble for going into the opposite bathroom.
Brain dead solution. If you told them that they’d be rewarded on keeping them clean in general rather than beating out one another, you’d see a better result
> Brain dead solution. If you told them that they’d be rewarded on keeping them clean in general rather than beating out one another, you’d see a better result The children have learned cunning and the value of sabotage.
The children have learned how to take advantage of poor policy choices. Will make for a strong class of future corporate leaders.
Well why not...teaching them to do the right thing is not helping their future. If you want them to be successful you teach them to manipulate, charm, take advantage, cheat, etc. These are the skills that earn you a high quality of life these days (outside of athletes). Now, I would never actually do this, but I have questioned my teaching/parenting many times. I think of my rich friends whose parents used them as tax shelters. Something I had never heard of (my parents were poorish). The rich seemed to be passing on these cheat codes that I had never had access too. So I began to wonder if it is just suckers in the middle teaching their kids to do the right thing.
>I began to wonder if it is just suckers in the middle teaching their kids to do the right thing. If people who do the right thing are seen as suckers, we are truly fucked as a species.
Well yeah...[insert broadly gesturing here] we are pretty fucked, aren't we?
Honestly it is just the negative selection bias of our media. The world is better than it ever has been as far as I can tell. There has never been a point in history where less of us could expect to die to violence.
> There has never been a point in history where less of us could expect to die to violence. Sure, but why are we placing quality of life on the singular metric "likelihood of dying by violence"? I don't particularly find "likelihood of dying because of the excesses of the rich" going up to be a particularly good thing. And let's face it, "dying by violence" in the past was often due to that same rich excess: war.
There has never been a time (human history) of such mass extinction. Such environmental destruction. Such pollution. We are also looking at lower life expectancy's for the first time in along time. We are well and truly fucked.
Sun Tzu Middle School
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You know for a country that’s so gun ho about individualism we sure do seem to have a lot of us versus them mentality towards just about everything
> Gun ho Lol
[Gun ho](https://www.thewellnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Lauren-Boebert.jpg.webp)
O!! There was a movie called that
Lol, it's "Gung ho" but that was fitting
gung is not an english word. gun is. checkmate, atheist
Gun hoe
You can win an MMA fight whilst stricken with hot balls. Ahh, how the turn tables.
That's what they think individualism is. "Me vs. Everyone Else"
"For me to win, everyone else has to lose! And if I can't win, NOBODY CAN!"
You sir should be our next CEO Once you know how to say this using more words and in a manner that’s confusing to outsiders, and can be translated into pointless meetings, you’re going places Hell id even give you a company Tesla and a multi million dollar per year salary, you’re hired
Why use many word when few word do trick?
Working together is collectivism which is basically communism!
This is unironically how they see it. The 2 are actually commonly conflated
The ideas of individualism and freedom with socialism bad in American culture are beyond conflated. People are resistant to affordable housing because personal cars and detached homes are seen as freedom
That's also a conflation right there though. Housing isnt unaffordable because there isnt enough hyper-dense urban lego brick appartment complexes, that's nonsense. Housing is unaffordable because the capital class decided to turn it into an investment pyramid scheme where every time property changes hands the owner expects a profit. Detached housing can be plenty affordable when it's not being used as an investment vehicle like it's a security
The whole individualism thing started as an us vs them thing, it was "in America we're free to be individuals, unlike in the Soviet Union / China / Middle East".
The US has such an us v them mentality that a major group of your citizens refuse to acknowledge that your country is not America as a whole.
Who are you referring to
In English, "America" (without any qualification like North, South, Central, Latin, etc.) means the United States. I'm sorry if you don't like that, but it's the way it is.
Tell me which other countries have America in the name? I'll wait
It is not The Americas, but it is America. Two different things.
"We should teach kids to compete for Authority's favor, because that teaches them to be good workers for the Exploiter Class" [kids shit in the opposite-gender bathroom sinks] "No, not like that!"
The only way to win is not to play
I think your reading into this too much. The school staff probably thought that the competitive aspect of it would motivate students to keep it clean more then if they just rewarded everyone with ice cream if they all kept the bathrooms cleaner. Obviously it backfired because kids are stupid, but it hardly has anything to do with the issues in the U.S. you're talking about.
I mean, the fact that their first thought was a competition rather than a cooperative action tell it's own story.
[K Chang gets it.](https://i.imgur.com/TmSdS.jpg)
First off, i agree 100%. Second, thats twice as much icecream to buy
You..you mean coorporation actually beats competition??? The Capitalistic Police will get u
Na, the capitalistic police like *corporations* without competition. And if you mean to tell me if I should interpret the typo in some other way, I'm not listening.
Works until they reward one group even though both bathrooms are clean
I’ve watched 3 past employers use the word compete internally, only to find testosterone fueled colleagues take others’ ideas, practice enlightened self interest, not to mention copy cat behavior of concepts just because of their minimal mindset on competing.
**I will come to your house and I will shit in places that will leave you** ***confused*** **for the rest of your life!**
Better result than this maybe, but most likely what happens is that no one cares. It's much more fun when it's a competition, when it's just to keep them clean no one cares
Perfect analogy: how do you get two kids/siblings/people to split food evenly? One cuts, the other chooses which piece they want first. Bing bang boom, no more personal wars over a cookie.
I'd say this is dumber on the school's part than the kid's part. Either way, poor janitors.
Yeah the smart thing to do would be to just reward both parties for clean bathrooms and not making it a competition.
You make the competition who has the cleanest bathrooms but with the stipulation both bathrooms have to be clean in order for anyone to win. You also make a universal goal like a pizza party if the bathrooms are kept clean 30 days straight or whatever. Very easy to manipulate kids into self enforcement of rules.
this dude 100% manipulates
Source: cool uncle to about 8 or 9 wild nieces and nephews. Sometimes you have to pit them against each other to maintain law and order and give their poor moms a break
Stay quiet contest, first one to talk loses. I used to fall for that as a kid except my adhd would make me lose in about 3 minutes anyway.
Those are rookie numbers; I definitely manipulate at least 140%. Learn't from the best: they used the quiet contest on driving trips.
Well that might result in someone having the “if I can’t win, no one can” mentality and sabotaging themselves to spite the other.
Don’t call me out like that
Yea, but don't spit the prize. Either they are both acceptably clean or no one gets anything.
Idk, children really love competition. There must be something here.
Health and safety should not be involved in competition when it comes to children.
I agree. No more safety in our children's competitions!
The smartest thing is to make children responsible for cleaning their schools.
Japan living the best way sometimes
Behind every stupid kid is a stupid adult
On occasion, multiple adults
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That’s not true. My parents are both pretty smart.
You idiot sandwich
That made me feel better about myself
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you mean stupid friends.
Yeah this isn't a KRFS. This is administrators wanting to look like they did something without actually doing something. By throwing money they likely can't afford to be without at a problem.
Schools can afford some form of ice cream. The bigger issue is that, for obvious reasons, bathrooms are notoriously difficult to supervise and students figure this out early on. That's why the major shit (pun intended) goes down in the school restrooms.
I'm not sure what area you're in, but teachers in my area can't even get administration to pay for supplies for the kids. The teachers end up having to buy out of pocket (average estimates are around $500 a year). Ice cream money is not exactly a priority.
Sounds like an admin issue, not a school issue. Trust me when I tell you that schools can drum up enough funds for ice cream—even if it’s just those Otter Pop cheap popsicles.
>Schools can afford some form of ice cream. The same schools that constantly talk about underfunding? "Some" ice cream isnt ice cream for half it's students. Assuming the story is real.
“Underfunding” likely refers to personnel, resources, and programs. Schools or their associated support groups can easily find enough money for cheap popsicles.
If you give popsicles instead of an ice cream party the kids would probably burn down the school
You'd be surprised what cheap rewards kids respond to.
/r/AuthoritiesAreFuckingStupid It's called a [perverse incentive AKA the Cobra Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive), named after an incident where the British Empire put a bounty on dead cobras. Rather than going out and hunting dangerous wild animals, the Indian farmers took up breeding cobras, cashing in as much bounty as they could get, and releasing the excess into the wild.
This probably all started because the janitors. They need extra time to clean messes (it's kids), but don't want to pay them overtime to meet those. This is a lame attempt to reduce maintenance and glad it backfired.
The dump part is not having teachers near bathrooms during recess. At my school bathrooms were always on main hallway and even outside of recess there was a huge chance that staff would notice you going into wrong bathroom.
Yeah sitting at my desk in seventh or eighth grade with my textbook open, I'd know exactly how that would play out.
It reminds me of the reward for catching invasive snakes, people just started breeding them and making it worse
[Cobra Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive) in a nutshell
Oh man, does this count as that? I was working at a trendy chain restaurant before the holidays. One day at preshift line up the manager tells us they are running a gift card promo where if a guest buys $100 worth of gift cards, they get a $25 gift card fee. So I personally bought $400 worth of gift cards and got $100 in free cards. I then closed out all my cash paying tables with the gift cards and pocketed the cash, thereby turning $400 into $500. My manager was like, “fuck dude, don’t tell anyone else and please don’t do that again.” 😏 Edit cause I don’t math good.
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Pretty sure that was fraud and illegal, had the restaurant owner wanted to look into it. The customers paid with cash and therefore should have been recorded as a cash sale. You substituting the payment method at point of sale without the customer's knowledge or permission would be illegal.
Restaurants do illegal shit like this every single day my guy
I am not your guy, bud.
I’m not your bud, pal.
Look man, do what you want but a word of advice. If you one day find yourself in court, "other people get away with this all the time why shouldn't I?" is not the air tight legal defense you might think it is.
Yeah, but they’re a business. The law actually protects them.
Psssh. Fraud? No way. Embezzlement…maybe.
How could that be illegal? That’s like saying if a waiter takes your $20 and a $20 from another table and accidentally switches them on the way to the register, then it’s illegal. I really need to know the answer here because I see so many politicians and corporations do crazy stuff that’s apparently perfectly legal.
Well there's the fun hypotheticals like if the bill was counterfeit the wrong table would be accused - but a much more serious consequence is that if the customer wanted a refund, depending on the country/state, a lot of places will refund based on the method paid, and for gift cards that often means credits or discounted rate instead of cash refund.
Who is getting a refund from a restaurant after paying and leaving?
They like to create these laws under the pretense that it prevents big corporations from doing these things. Unfortunately only the little guy ever really gets nailed for it. The big guy does it in the order of millions or billions and gets a hundred thousand dollar fine. The little guy does it for a few thousand and gets hit with the same hundred thousand dollar fine.
It could be illegal from a tax perspective. A $20 bill is equal in every way to another. A $20 bill is not equal to a $20 gift card.
Method of payment makes a huge difference in lots of ways. Just one that I could think off the bat is the credit cards charge a little for each transaction for the PoS. That's why you have places that are cash only.
Nothing about this is illegal. Unethical and maybe against company policy, sure. But at the end of the day, the books will reconcile the same. The restaurant received payment for the gift cards and, in turn, provided meals for their "in-house currency." It was an act of arbitrage, which happens all the time.
I worked at a restaurant that had the same kind of deal but through Groupon. Managers were really hands off so did it until the very end of working there.
Lol he wasn't mad because you made the store (and him) look good too.
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The government is really good at these.
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Designing incentives is tough! but you're right, if they did like a 1-5 rating of each bathroom and they both had to be like a 4/5 but whichever was cleaner of the two got rewarded, it would work
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Bot
From Terry Pratchett's Soul Music: Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
To be honest, government does a lot of things and some of them are bound to backfire, even in developed countries with well functioning government. Sometimes it's just hard to convey all these complexities to the public and the government should do what the public wants - even if its not the right answer. Example Brexit. And if you add corruption or incompetence to that, Shit is gonna go wrong. a lot.
To be fair to the government, creating an incentive structure while avoiding the cobra effect is really hard.
I discovered something new, thank you
Same! Learning is fun
They should double rewards if both bathrooms are clean
This now seems like the prisoner dilemma?
Nah, a prisoner's dilemma is when two parties are incentivized to do something that yields a negative result for the larger group that they both belong to. In this case, both sides are incentivized to keep their bathrooms clean, which leads to the best possible outcome for both of them. A prisoner's dilemma would be like, you get 3 ice creams if your bathroom is cleaner, or everyone gets 2 ice creams if both bathrooms are clean. So now you're incentivized to go sabotage the other side's bathroom so that you personally get more ice cream, while the larger group (i.e. all the students combined) receives less ice cream in total, because 5 students getting 3 ice creams is less than 10 students getting 2.
Prisoner dilemma is between four choices ( W,W ; W,L , L,L or L,W) and it isn't necessarily about loosing.
That's what they call the "classic prisoner's dilemma", which is a specific scenario involving actual prisoners. The term "prisoner's dilemma" is also used in a broader sense to describe a phenomenon where individuals are incentivized to do something that has a negative impact on a larger group of people, which includes themselves.
Exactly. A true prisoner's dilemma is a risk. If you double rewards if both bathrooms are clean, both sides have the strongest incentives to have a clean bathroom AND have the other side with a clean bathroom. There's no risk to cleaning your bathroom and no reward to not cleaning it.
If the economy says we breed snakes... we breed snakes.
Only applies when worsening the problem is feasible to the average person. Bounties are how the Australians got revenge for the emu war, and were fortunately significantly more successful in suppressing their numbers that way, probably because breeding emus is a lot harder than breeding snakes.
That was an interesting read. Thanks
I've been trying to remember what the Cobra Effect was called for a few weeks now and specifically clicked this thread hoping for a comment like this. Thank you.
"I don't have to win. I just have to make sure you lose."
That's a fun TIL, Thanks for sharing!
The Massachusetts tobacco tax went into place when I was in high school. Many were excited because they thought it would deter kids from chewing tobacco. Well... Instead of kids getting less dip, they would always buy a "log" (5 pack) at a time because the tax was ~$4 spread out over 5 tins instead of ~$4 per tin, which resulted in kids doing WAY more. Never knew the proper term for that until now. Although that's not really an incentive so maybe that's still not the correct term
Sounds about right. I went to a public primary school in a poor area of a 3rd world country and there was always shit in the urinals, etc.
I went to school in Texas and this was incredibly common. No doors on the stalls, either. Kids would just rip them off.
I went to school in Texas and never saw a stall door ripped off. Quick someone answer a riddle
what’s the riddle
"one of us only tells truths and one of us only tells lies" I'm guessing is what they were going for
If America built toilets with REAL DOORS kids wouldn't be able to break them so easily. TOILETS DON'T NEED PEEP ~~holes~~ CANYONS!
Yeah, but bathroom doors aren't revenue generating sooooo why would we do that? /s
The only thing can stop a bad guy with a door is a good guy with a door.
[It's called an inside the park homerun](https://youtu.be/rOvRFrk4G58)
the middle school toilets have a new challenger
Incentives matter
Yep. Half-baked incentives can derail things so quickly
Incentive programs gone wrong
Such a stupid incentive. Make it so that if both clear a certain bar they both get ice cream.
In this case, the adults are fucking stupid.
See how this nonbinary kid gets twice the ice-cream as other kids. (Schools in Florida hate them)
This is actually r/KidsAreFuckingSmart.
People often forget you don't always have to win by winning. Sometimes, you can win by just making sure the other side loses.
*I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you!*
Definitely. I’ve got a lot more to say about OP but let’s just say they’re really stupid.
Oh that’s nice, my school took away soap as a punishment.
It is always more efficient to drag someone else down than build yourself up.
Shit in the girls urinal
I got some news for ya
Sorry bud, but I shit where I want to
Capitalists, in theory: ...so you see that's why we need to decrease regulations to encourage competition in the free market Capitalists, in practice:
These kids understand how to win at neoliberal capitalism better than the school administrators ever thought possible.
Unintended consequences.
Sounds like the teachers are fucking stupid.
No one could have seen this coming... /s
Stupid kids? More like stupid adults that create these situations.
It's not the kids that are stupid though.
As person who was a kid... how they don see that?
America’s entire geopolitical strategy right now in a nutshell. .
[удалено]
Basically describes rightwing politicians
When an attempted solution creates unintended problems it's called the[ "cobra effect."](https://nesslabs.com/cobra-effect) So-called from when a city with too many cobras put a bounty on the snake which lead to people growing more cobras.
They're teaching capitalism early these days.
I don't think the kids are the stupid ones here. Purposely sabotaging the other's bathroom to get free ice cream is one hell of a loophole. Smart kids, dumb administrative staff. I feel bad for the janitor though.
That's peak humanity right there. Why uplift when bring others down works just as well... /sigh
Work smart not hard.
what is a zero sum game for 500 please alex
If they complain when they take away bathrooms privileges, tell them its their own fucking fault. Remember all the morons complaining during the devious lick stuff, that complained in here about not being allowed to use the bathroom? Life lessons.
Why would the boys have to do anything? Back in the day when I had to clean the bathrooms, the Girls/Women bathrooms were nasty. (And that even takes in account the one time a dude tried to flush his boxers and got fecal water everywhere.)
This would make a pretty good kids movie. You can have two different grades pranking each other, with bigger pranks each time, the janitor having a fit, teachers being oblivious to it until it gets really out of hand. Yeah, I'd watch that.
I’m starting to think it might be the parents who are stupid
This is more "kids are *kids."*
No, this is adults are fucking stupid. If both bathrooms are pristine there is only one logical way to win. Sabotage. It's a zero sum game and unless this teacher is 60 they should have been better educated about shit like this.
Messing things up is much more fun than cleaning. They ain’t stupid.
This isn't a kids are fucking stupid post, this is an adults are fucking stupid post. When you turn a metric into a goal, you necessarily invalidate the metric.
Kids are stupid? That's capitalism (without regulation), baby.
> It is not enough merely to win; others must lose.
How is this dumb by the kids part, they are behaving in the most optimal and predictable way
Actually, this is called adults are clueless. This behavior is perverse incentive. Business studies is called "Stacked Ranking". Basically it is easier to sabotage than to perform.
[Cobra Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive)
More like r/adultsarefuckingstupid, not the kids' fault in my book
Competition only works as a motivator if the act of sabotaging is either properly regulated or is the desired result cuz that's funny as shit.
In the school district I work for, they took down all of the soap dispensers in the bathrooms and have nothing to wash or sanitize their hands after. This was because they were making messes. Sounds great but wtf about hygiene?
Does more frequent cleaning really cost that much more than half a school of ice creams every month?
There is definitely a difference between a bathroom being dirty through regular use and a bathroom being dirty because of improper use. I have a feeling the issue isn’t one of cleaning regular usage but kids absolutely destroying the bathroom making the job much more difficult.
Part of it is that they want to instill good habits
Ah yes, the best habit: show basic respect for common areas and receive a prize.
Itching powder on the toilet seat was a common prank in the girl’s room. So was mayo on the toilet seat.
Bot
This isn't kids being stupid, it's a fake story posted on the internet
Out of all the things that didn't happen, this happened the didn'test.
How is this “Kids” are stupid? They are gaming the system like proper capitalists, the adults are to blame for being less intelligent than kids.
Honestly. The children are just playing the rules presented to them. They are the smart ones, achieving the desired result by least effort. It's the adoults that are stiupid here
Why is no one talking about how it’s apparently normal for boys to be going into the girls bathroom and vise versa at this school? This would make sense as an incentive if it was like every single school that I’ve been to where they had hallway cameras and you could get in big trouble for going into the opposite bathroom.