Snapshot · TED Talks Daily
British colonists in Delhi offered a bounty for cobra skins to reduce snake populations, but Indians began breeding cobras to collect the reward — the classic 'cobra effect' of perverse incentives.
Where this was said
At 14:14 · chapter starts 12:00
Shariff turns the lens on his own lab with a story that lands with uncomfortable precision. Because being a professor let him keep adolescent sleep habits well into his 30s, he sent emails at all hours of the night. A graduate student noticed — and, rather than actually working those hours, used a scheduling app to make his replies appear at 1–2 AM, manufacturing the impression of round-the-clock industriousness. [1] — Azim Shariff "A graduate student used an app to delay his emails to arrive at 1–2 AM, mimicking his professor's insomniac schedule to appear more industr…" 12:34 Shariff had sent entirely the wrong cultural signal, and his student's response was rational within that culture: perform effort rather than produce work. Shariff calls it 'literally bullshit work.' He had to actively rebuild his lab's culture around actual output. He also names the broader cultural phenomenon as 'effort porn' — the tendency to admire visible struggle for its own sake. Even he admits you can't simply learn to resist this bias; it's too deeply ingrained. But you can learn to notice it, and notice when it's making your decisions for you.
A graduate student used an app to schedule emails to appear sent at 1–2 AM to signal he was working all hours, exemplifying performative effort — 'literally bullshit work.'
A graduate student used an app to delay his emails to arrive at 1–2 AM, mimicking his professor's insomniac schedule to appear more industrious. His professor had to actively dismantle his lab's culture of effort performance.
You probably can't unlearn the mental circuit that links effort to morality. But awareness is enough: notice the bias, and you can stop it from running your important decisions on autopilot.
A bounty for dead cobras in colonial Delhi accidentally made the snake problem worse — and Shariff argues we've done something eerily similar with work culture. By rewarding effort rather than meaning, we've flooded the world with performative labor.
By his own account, Giacomo Casanova slept with over 120 women and contracted venereal disease 11 times — a life of extreme aesthetic indulgence that ended in total isolation.
Joel de la Garza noted that the CISO role is a relatively recent invention, with Steve Katz widely credited as the first-ever CISO.
Superficial adoption of electricity gave factories only 6% efficiency gains; fully redesigning factories around it delivered a 3x productivity improvement that powered 20th-century US growth.
Harold Ramis recounted that during Caddyshack filming, storms kept the cast cooped up in a Florida hotel for days, during which they partied and did drugs all day and night.
In the 1820s, China accounted for 25% of global economic output, making it the world's largest economic machine — a historical precedent for its current AI superpower ambitions.
66 Americans held hostage at the US Embassy in Iran were released after 444 days, within hours of Reagan's inauguration.
In the first round of the secret arms deal, 508 TOW missiles were transferred from Israel to Iran in exchange for hostage releases.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran across 8 separate shipments over just over a year.
Despite all the missile sales, only 3 of the 7 American hostages held by Lebanese terrorists were ultimately released.
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