The Cobra Effect and the Formation of Wisdom

There’s a story economists like to tell, probably apocryphal, but instructive.

During British colonial rule in India, officials in Delhi offered a bounty for dead cobras. They were concerned about the snake population and wanted to reduce it. The story goes that people soon realized hunting wild cobras was far harder and more labor-intensive than breeding their own to kill for the reward. When the government eventually canceled the program, the breeders released their captive cobras into the wild, making the original problem far worse.

German economist Horst Siebert coined the term “cobra effect” in 2001 to describe what happens when you incentivize the wrong thing. The policy wasn’t malicious. The intent was clear. But once you decide to measure and incentivize something, you’re selecting for it. And often you get the opposite of what you intended.

What we measure becomes what we optimize for.

What we can’t measure becomes invisible.

In my last post, I described how Western universities were built around holding two things together: Wissenschaft (disciplined knowledge) and Bildung (formation of the person). Many of us entered academic life because we wanted to participate in both.

I want to teach my students clinical skills and form them in the discipline of counseling. I believe that learning psychological theory is not just acquiring information. It is a way that truth calls us toward a larger world, one with the possibility of pursuing genuine good.

Knowledge matters. But knowledge is never divorced from the knower. We are changed, unsettled, and disrupted by what we learn.

The role of the professor, as I see it, is to assist in that disruption, to steward knowledge in service of wisdom.

This is one reason I find Wil Gafney’s treatment of biblical Wisdom so compelling. In Proverbs, Wisdom is not presented as a possession or achievement. She calls from the streets, prepares a table, and invites people into a different way of seeing and living. Wisdom is not simply something we acquire. It is something we learn to recognize, respond to, and love.

Wisdom is cultivated through struggle, failure, revision, and living with knowledge over time. It cannot be downloaded, transferred, or possessed. It emerges through encounter.

This means education is not just about credentials. It is about formation. It is about learning to ask better questions, not simply acquiring better answers.

This is the calling many of us signed up for. But here’s the problem: a relationship with Wisdom is difficult to measure.

Wisdom and formation sound beautiful in a blog post. They are much harder to standardize, guarantee, or control for. Metrics, numbers, and data are easier to possess and report. Easier to defend in a budget meeting. Easier to place on a dashboard.

The shift toward measurement hasn’t happened out of malice. It has happened through what we might call the tyranny of the practical. Accountability demands data. Funding requires numbers. Rankings depend on metrics. Budgets need justification.

The question becomes inevitable: How do we know if we’re doing a good job? So we measure what we can.

In academia, this looks like publications, citations, grant funding, graduation rates, retention rates, student evaluations, employability metrics, and increasingly earnings data. None of these measures are inherently bad. There’s nothing wrong with counting graduates.

But the act of measurement changes things.

What gets counted counts.

What cannot be measured gradually disappears from view.

A student studies history and discovers that the world could have been otherwise. A scientist encounters evidence that overturns a cherished assumption. A therapist-in-training realizes that their own defenses shape what they hear in the consulting room. None of these transformations are easily quantifiable. Yet they may be among the most important things education does.

The problem isn’t simply that we measure the wrong things. The deeper issue is that measurement slowly and almost imperceptibly changes what we value.

Metrics do not ask whether something is true. They ask whether it produces a desired outcome. A publication counts whether it is wise or not. A social media post counts whether it is illuminating or not. A response from an AI counts if it is useful enough.

Once usefulness becomes the primary criterion, truth becomes secondary.

Consider social media. Likes, engagement, and followers are measurable. But they don’t tell us whether we are healthier, wiser, or more connected. They tell us whether we’ve learned how to work the algorithm.

This is why rage-bait works.

Algorithms measure engagement, not the quality of engagement. They optimize for what can be counted, and eventually we begin optimizing ourselves in the same way.

Something similar is happening with AI.

In Eucontamination, my sister Billie and I draw on Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between truth and bullshit. Frankfurt argues that the liar still cares about truth because the lie depends on it. The bullshitter, by contrast, is indifferent to truth. The bullshitter cares only about effect.

What worries me is not simply that AI can generate falsehoods. It’s that we increasingly seem comfortable with them.

We know large language models hallucinate. We know they confidently produce errors. We use them anyway because the output is often useful enough. Fast enough. Convenient enough.

This is not exactly lying. It is something closer to becoming comfortable with bullshit.

We’ve reduced truth to fact and fact to data. Then we’ve built systems that measure data. In doing so, we’ve lost some of our capacity to demand that what we encounter actually be true rather than merely useful.

The comfortable lie becomes acceptable because it seems to work. The answer feels right. The output is plausible. And that’s often enough.

When you make publications the metric for tenure and promotion, you’re not just rewarding one thing. You’re selecting for a certain kind of person. Professors who can publish prolifically. Scholars skilled at marketing their research. People who optimize for citation potential. Fields with easier access to publication gain disproportionate attention.

This doesn’t mean that everyone who publishes is shallow or that research itself is the problem. The point is simpler and more unsettling. Every system forms the people who participate in it.

Over time, institutions reward certain habits, desires, and ways of seeing the world. What begins as a metric becomes a culture.

This isn’t about individual moral failure. It’s structural. A good person trying to keep their job will optimize for what is measured. A brilliant scholar facing tenure review will publish rather than sit with questions or students. A caring professor may curve grades to maintain high evaluations.

The system creates the incentives. People respond rationally to them.

The cobra effect teaches us something important: you don’t need malice for a system to produce the opposite of what you intended. You just need to measure the wrong thing.

And yet students still need something else.

They still need to encounter truth that disrupts them, that refuses to be reduced to data points. They still need Wisdom calling from the streets. They still need someone willing to insist that usefulness is not the same thing as truth.

This is where the professor’s role becomes essential, but only if we remember what that role actually is.

In a system optimized for what is measurable, the professor can be the one who still points beyond the metric. The one who refuses the comfortable falsehood. The one who says, “I don’t know,” “That isn’t good enough,” or “That doesn’t ring true.”

As Billie and I argue in Eucontamination:

“Truth does not leave us comfortable. Bullshit does. Bullshit is reassuring while Truth is uncanny, numinous, and dangerous. Truth nags instead of soothes. It spooks and haunts us.”

The professor is not merely a guardian of information or even a guardian of truth. The professor is someone willing to be transformed by truth and to invite students into that same disruption.

Not because transformation can be guaranteed, but because it remains possible.

The professor professes. Not just facts, but a way of relating to knowledge. They are not simply a conduit for information, but someone who has been shaped by a discipline, who has struggled with it, been changed by it, and who can invite others into that same encounter, helping them learn not merely answers, but how to ask better questions.

The cobra effect teaches us that systems rarely produce exactly what we intend. They produce what they reward. Universities are no exception.

We’ve measured Wissenschaft and lost sight of Bildung. We’ve measured productivity and stopped paying attention to transformation. We’ve measured credentials and forgotten that education forms people long before it grants degrees.

The crucial point is that formation never stopped. Students are being formed right now. Professors are being formed right now.

We are all being shaped by the structures we inhabit, the metrics we adopt, the technologies we use, and the incentives we create.

The question is not whether formation is taking place. The question is what kind of people our systems are helping us become.

This is why AI matters.

AI did not create our obsession with measurement. It simply excels at the thing we have spent decades optimizing for. It does brilliantly what the system has increasingly reduced education to: knowledge transmission, information delivery, answering questions, and producing plausible outputs.

The danger is not that AI will prevent formation. Formation is unavoidable. The danger is that we fail to notice the formation already taking place.

We are always being educated by the structures we build. The question is whether those structures are cultivating wisdom, a love of truth, and the capacity to live with uncertainty, or whether they are teaching us to value only what can be counted, optimized, and measured.

AI offers us an opportunity to ask that question again.

Not because it threatens education, but because it reveals what education has been becoming all along.

Otherwise, we risk trying to turn ourselves into images of the machines we built.

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Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press, 2016.

Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005.

Gafney, Wil. “Wisdom’s Table is God’s Table.” Sermon. September 19, 2018. https://www.wilgafney.com/2018/09/19/wisdoms-table-is-gods-table/

Gafney, Wil. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Westminster John Knox Press, 2017.

Hoard, Paul, and Billie Hoard. Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life. Cascade Books, 2025.

Mitchell, Richard. The Gift of Fire: How Symbolic Literacy Developed Human Potential. Simon & Schuster, 1987.

Siebert, Horst. Der Kobra-Effekt: Wie man Irrwege der Wirtschaftspolitik Vermeidet (The Cobra Effect: How to Avoid Economic Policy Going Astray). 2001.