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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US.

Taking a leaf from Deming, we have a system, a process, a society that creates a certain, relatively stable, number of criminals per year. Trying to address specific criminal acts or specific criminals is just meddling that can backlash as easily as it can help.

When you have a stable source of trouble, it makes no sense to try to fix individual occurrences. You have to address the problem at the source.

We have created this system! We can create something else if we're unhappy with it.

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How do you solve the source of the problem when it is created due to problems at multiple layers and at best you can only change one or two layers?

> Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US.

There's an old nugget that if anyone could time-travel they'd go back in time and kill Hitler. Nobody would go a few more years back to educate him.

People are not educated to look at the big picture but to react in the moment. Stop the theft as it's happening. Shoot. This goes best with societies where taking a life is considered appropriate response to someone trying to steal your fishing lure, societies where your individual rights trump absolutely anything else (imagine explicitly voting to pay more taxes yourself because that will benefit the poorer part of the population).

Reacting in the moment requires almost no thought out process. It's mostly autonomous, a reflex. Thinking of the bigger picture, identifying a root cause, identifying the impact of each of your options, these all take a strong enough education to override that reflex.

It's not just education, it's shitty parenting. You'd recursively have to educate Hitler's parents, and to do that you have to educate their parents etc. ad nauseum. Pretty soon you'd blow your stack. Naive interventionism is worse than just whacking Hitler.

Do people really grow up to be their parents? Did you?

Why do you think Hitler was Hitler?

Why do yall think Hitler invented anti-semitism in Germany? Big Bad Wolf fallacy.

They don't. People grow up to be like their friends, who in turn grow up to be like the general cultural sentiments among the adults they interact with. (Source: The Nurture Assumption.)

I think the point is to whack hitler now but also invest in education now so that you have less hitlers to whack in a few generations time.

Eh. People will disagree on what the root cause is. Just to give you an idea how easy it is to undermine this argument. What if I declare that the root cause of all this is being human. What do you do?

Thinking of bigger picture is all well and good, but the moment you mention education I cannot help, but chuckle. In the context of US, education already is.. lets call it overburdened. Maybe the solution is not to override the reflex, but to appropriately channel it.

For the record, I am just putting words together. It is late and infant does not want to sleep.

> What if I declare that the root cause of all this is being human. What do you do?

Ask you what your evidence is for that assertion given that crime rates vary so widely around the world for disparate reasons.

The prevalence and types of crimes committed really do vary widely as well (though its often hard to get a clear picture since different countries have different reporting mechanisms (or none at all)).

But some crime always persists non? The problem is the intersection between irrational actors being put in a game predicated on consequences.

> Return backwards in time and kill Hitler

Hum, could I suggest an evil alternative? Just schedule a few meetings with the people that lend money to Hitler and explain them that he will try to keep the money and will go to extreme measures to avoid returning it, including killing them or their relatives if possible. Really bad investment, don't touch this turd with a thousand foot pole. Thank me later when you still own your castle in Europe.

Result: Hitler never climb in a position to became Hitler. Nobody dies, nobody needs to enter in a war to recover the investment and you don't became a murderer. Hollywood would be devastated for sure but, apart of this...everybody wins :-)

Hitler didn't do his thing in a vacuum. There was an opportunity for him, circumstances, values of the time, the trauma to Germany what happened in the first world war and after it, competing ideologies like communism, political instability in Germany, inflation, recession etc.

So maybe the person could go back in time and discuss with the negotiators at the Versailles treaty after the first world war. Or maybe try to inject some economics education to try to prevent the hyperinflation.

Room for some XKCD or SMBC comics!

Hitler was significantly more educated than most modern progressives. From wikipedia:

  He read newspapers and pamphlets that published the thoughts of philosophers and theoreticians such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Le Bon and Arthur Schopenhauer. Georg Ritter von Schönerer became a major influence on Hitler.  He also developed an admiration for Martin Luther. During his time in Vienna, he pursued a growing passion for architecture and music, attending ten performances of Lohengrin, his favourite Wagner opera.

It is a fallacy that murderous racists are simply uninformed, that they just weren't in school on that day in the fourth grade where your teacher tells you to be nice to people. Some of the authors he was acquainted with were vocally against anti-semitism. The most dangerous monsters are highly educated people.

I take issue with every sentence you wrote. "Highly educated"? I don't think so. "Some of the authors" - you mean Nietzsche, I guess. It seems likely he didn't read Nietzsche's books, but just the bits quoted in (anti-semitic) newspapers. Check out Chamberlain and Schönerer. The first thing you notice is the strong Nazi-type flavour of their thoughts. Wagner and Luther are notorious for their extreme anti-semitism. That first wiki-sentence comes to "He read the paper". My understanding is, on the street corners and cafes of Vienna in those days were a dozen different half-nutty political groups, and Hitler took a bit from every one of them. The stuff was in the air, if you stopped to breathe it in.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Ritter_von_Sch%C3%B6nere...

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