Things you know, that ain’t so, or ‘everything you thought you know is false porn’… the Cobra Effect

A tweet:

Wow, I had spent the longest time believing the Cobra effect story of the British Raj was true, but had trouble finding a proper cite. Turns out googling it with “apocryphal” did the trick: it’s entirely made up. A lesson in trusting libertarian economistshttps://theweek.in/columns/bibek-debroy/2019/11/01/cobra-skin-and-rat-tails.html

(1) Siberian fox on Twitter: “Wow, I had spent the longest time believing the Cobra effect story of the British Raj was true, but had trouble finding a proper cite. Turns out googling it with “apocryphal” did the trick: it’s entirely made up. A lesson in trusting libertarian economists https://t.co/HLgWWEDzbd https://t.co/B4N05LueAO” / Twitter

Wow, I had spent the longest time believing the Cobra effect story of the British Raj was true, but had trouble finding a proper cite. Turns out googling it with "apocryphal" did the trick: it's entirely made up. A lesson in trusting libertarian economistshttps://t.co/HLgWWEDzbd pic.twitter.com/B4N05LueAO

— Siberian fox (@SilverVVulpes) April 3, 2023

There are further useful comments in the chat – including the likelihood that this story about Chinese labourers on the Yangtze paying someone to whip them… https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/27/did-chinese-laborers-on-the-yangtze-pay-someone-to-whip-them-and-why-cant-political-scientists-and-economists-resist-telling-this-evidence-free-story/ (lots more in the comments there too)

…likely came from Asterix

This goes into the history of the Chinese labourer whipping myth but I really doubt the 'true origin' of the story they come up with: "A tale told by the mother of someone in the 1970s."

This story is in Asterix & Cleopatra, published 1963 https://t.co/nMf4BGCXxi pic.twitter.com/FZtz3qypZ8

— Wie Dan🍃 (@LudditeHacker) June 2, 2022

This of course makes you wonder how many of the other examples are true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_original_cobra_effect

Parachuting cats probably *is* at least partly true…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cat_Drop

But many other things are not true, like ‘the fleas in the jar’ and ‘the boiling frog’

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-glass-lid-experiment-with-fleas-real-or-merely-apocryphal/answer/Ken-Saladin

And like the (slightly more complex) Mehrabian study… see https://conversational-leadership.net/mehrabian-myth/ and https://publicwords.com/2009/07/23/debunking-the-debunkers-the-mehrabian-myth-explained-correctly/

What else is widely quoted but simply untrue?