[kpwags]

I wonder how many people use stuff like this to cheat the system? I remember seeing someone on reddit bragging about attaching their Fitbit to a reciprocating saw to get more steps than his wife.

I couldn't figure out why it was that important, but with insurance discounts, I can definitely see the financial incentives.

[bluedino]

I worked in this space, and yes, if the employer offers an incentive, people will cheat. Even for something like a $10 Dunkin Donuts gift card (heck of a incentive for a health/wellness program).

We'd go through logs and see people sequentially logging for each day, one team member after another, on the last day of the competition.

You'd also find people scrutinizing the accuracy of any reporting we did as a company - some very odd bugs were found by companies with participants armed with Excel and too much time on their hands.

[sundvor]

Donuts as a reward for physical activity - what the actual??

[astura]

FWIW, if you are unfamiliar with Dunkin Donuts, the most common item people buy from there is coffee, by far. In fact, I have seen Dunkin Donuts that only sell coffee.

A lot of their speciality drinks are basically milkshakes though.

[sokoloff]

"That's why little chocolate donuts have been on my training table since I was a kid..."

https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/little-chocola...

[sundvor]

Geographic Restriction This content is not available in your location.

[sokoloff]

Sorry. It's an old John Belushi Saturday Night Live sketch where he wins some Olympic-type events and then the voiceover claims that "little chocolate donuts" were part of his training regimen. Last shot is a picture of some fat, stubby fingers holding a half-smoked cigarette and reaching for another donut.

[sundvor]

:) Thanks!

[Splines]

People are willing to go quite far sometimes: https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/8fu7wi/albertan_cha...

[geofft]

This feels like an abstracted form of arbitrage: the markets have figured out that there's a quantifiable risk difference between men and women, but they have not distinguished cis and trans folks in their model, and not figured out whether this is a hormones-at-birth difference, or a current-hormones difference, or a socialization difference, or what. They have also certainly not figured out how to distinguish actual trans folks from arbitrageurs (this is something that I think the law ought not to try too hard to figure out, on limited-government grounds, but the markets would love to take as much data as they can and feed it into a model). Once they figure it out, they'll price this person as a person, and he won't be able to swing it as dramatically.

Gender is a pretty crude (though effective) axis to make this sort of risk distinction on. An insurance company that can accurately figure out which men are lower-risk to insure than the average man will probably have a pretty good time in the market. (And get a head start on any policy changes about not discriminating on gender.)

[allenz]

> Once they figure it out, they'll price this person as a person, and he won't be able to swing it as dramatically.

Ronald Coase, of Coase theorem fame, believed that markets are rarely efficient: "Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality."[1] In this case, the inefficiency persists because the costs of implementing a more detailed model would far exceed the benefits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I liked this hilarious little bit at the end of that post:

Disclaimer I must say (for anyone who tries to report me) that I didn’t legally change my sex solely for cheaper auto-insurance, though, that was and is a big factor for me and other people who suffer from gender-dysphoria.

[_wbux]

> that was and is a big factor for me and other people who suffer from gender-dysphoria.

Yeah... never once heard anyone say that "car insurance" was why they got their gender changed on government paperwork. The whole things looks very suspect and found this thread on r/asktransgender talking about this which rather than trying to summarize I'll let you enjoy and read for yourself https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/8g0ai9/chea...

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I interpreted it as being a joke, which while may be construed as poor taste, was probably made in jest.

One commenter on the original thread pointed out the other difficulties the OP will eventually run into regarding booking flights, etc. so I presume that since the OP is not actually dysmorphic or having gender dysphoria that they will eventually discover that what they will encounter from doing this was not worth the $1000 a year saved.

[userbinator]

Gender is a state of mind in Canada and therefore Alberta.

If it catches on, it will probably stop working once the statistics reveal gender-changed MtoF's to be just as high in accident rates as regular males.

[geofft]

Assuming that's what they reveal, yes. If accident rates are linked to testosterone levels, trans women taking hormone-replacement therapy should have statistically lower accident rates - and trans men taking hormone-replacement therapy should have statistically higher accident rates.

[fjsolwmv]

But HRT is not necessary for registering a legal Gender.

[ams6110]

A lot. I'd be surprised if any Business Management 101 class didn't teach that if there is a reward involved, people will maximize for whatever critera you measure.

[Johnny555]

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

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.[3] The government therefore offered 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

[otakucode]

Things like that should be, but never are, a real teaching moment for people. Manipulating social behavior through any means other than education (which isn't manipulation) leads to destructive unintended consequences. Look at what happened in the USA thanks to the American Heart Association.

The AHA thought they saw a slight suggestion in the data that high levels of saturated fat led to heart disease. They wanted to stop heart disease. So they set a goal. Reduce the average Americans dietary intake of saturated fats by 15%. They worked for years with other agencies, legislators, regulators, and food companies. And they succeeded! They dropped the average Americans intake of saturated fats (well specifically the portion of the daily calorie intake made up of saturated fats) by 15%!

There was an issue though. Food makers took fat out of their foods, producing "Lite" versions. These tasted like cardboard. People stopped buying. To get people to buy their products again, they brought back the flavor. With salt and lots of sugar. This led to a gigantic increase in the total number of calories people ate. Which led to a nationwide obesity episdemic. Which led to a national diabetes epidemic. Which led to record-breaking levels of... heart disease.

Oh, and research found that saturated fats aren't a danger to heart health. But once you've put things into law, established practices and regulations, it's tremendously difficult to change. If they had just told everyone they thought saturated fats might cause heart disease, none of this would have happened. And they would have been able to retract their statements on a dime.

[pizza]

this, this, this... a thousand times, this.......

nay, 1 in 4 [0] x 330 million times, this.........

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

[tzs]

What did the Delhi residents themselves think about cobras? Were the natives OK with cobras running around and it was just the British that wanted to reduce the population?

I'm curious because if everybody disliked wild cobras loose in the city I'd have expected the breeders to kill their stock when the bounty ended, not free it.

[s73v3r_]

Why? Killing them requires, well, doing something. You have to actually kill them, which takes effort, and then you have to dispose of the carcasses, which takes effort. On the other hand, simply turning them loose is no effort at all.

[djrogers]

If you own a machete (or rampiri, or kukri), the marginal cost (and frankly effort) of killing a cobra is basically zero. And disposing of the dead ones has to be as easy or easier than disposing of live ones if you factor in any factors related to other people...

[emodendroket]

Why would you expect that in a world where people dump hazardous waste into rivers to save money?

[zeusk]

> a world where people dump hazardous waste into rivers to save money

That mostly comes down to insufficient education, greed and lack of immediate consequences.

Letting a live snake roam free is entirely different in that an uneducated man would understand the risk, there is no upside and there is a possibility for immediate consequence.

[tedunangst]

Because dehazarding waste is more difficult than chopping up a snake?

[emodendroket]

But letting the snakes go is even easier. Use the example of people littering instead of using a trash can, or not flushing public toilets, if you need a demonstration of how people can't be bothered with even simple tasks.

[stochastic_monk]

Happens in America, too.

[dredmorbius]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16681073

[eli]

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

[dragonwriter]

That's only true to the extent that the chosen measure was only coincidentally something that looked like a good measure to start with; if you were actually measuring the true feature of merit, making it a target wouldn't make it a bad measure. Making a measure a target incentivizes discovery of its deficiencies, if any, as a measure.

[pmichaud]

I agree with you in the narrow sense, but I bet you can't think of a metric that should be hyper-focused on for any purpose. Even something like "Lives Saved" fails pretty hard if you do it hard enough.

[eli]

What's an example of a metric that measures the true merit of something?

[Dylan16807]

No metric is perfect, but if you were measuring fat percentage in a moderately-accurate way it would be a very solid basis for an incentive.

[kevin_nisbet]

Reminds me of one of my favourite stories about this: https://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/how-hard-could-it-be-s...

[ryandrake]

This is probably true for all jobs and compensation schemes, but for some reason super true in Sales. Take a sales guy who failed middle school math, give him as complicated a salary/bonus structure as you can and overnight he will turn into Albert Einstein and optimize his behavior to produce the most money.