Fantastic post by @Dr Anton Howes on whether history has a reproducibility crisis.
I've been digging up history of science anecdotes & stats, and it's astounding how many (1) have no citation, (2) trace back to nowhere, or (3) contradict the original source.
ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-inven
Take the 'cobra effect' for example. You might have heard it on Freakonomics.
It's the story that a bounty for snakes in colonial Delhi backfired because people started breeding snakes instead. The cobra menace rose 'by a few orders of magnitude'!
freakonomics.com/podcast/the-co
Except … there's no evidence it happened, and was described as a vague rumour at the time. books.google.co.uk/books?id=VIc3A
Instead, the policy failure was attributed to other factors like insufficient reward for catching dangerous snakes; people catching non-venomous snakes; etc.
tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108
Neither does the story mention colonial India had bounty schemes for other wild animals that massively reduced their numbers.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117
And so did almost every state in America at the time. naldc.nal.usda.gov/download/IND23
Bounties for snakes were organized across India, so I tried to find out whether death rates really rose by 'a few orders of magnitude'. The answer seems to be no.
jstor.org/stable/10.7722
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10
Saloni
@salonium
Co-founder & editor @WorksInProgMag. Writer, Scientific Discovery. Podcaster, Hard Drugs. Advisor, @coeff_giving. // Prev @OurWorldInData.
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