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Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

> It's easier to stop incentivizing people to ruin the commons

It's impossible. No matter how good of a job you do, there will _always_ be people out to watch it all burn.

When underlying problems are left untreated the number of unreasonable responses increases as a symptom of that. For sure, you'll always have that tiny minority who are just misanthropes. But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with. The modern world incentivizes creating underlying problems because not only can you profit from the unreasonable responses, but you can sell protection against them as well. A large portion of the economy actually revolves around this as a consequence of the shift towards service rather than production.

> But a lot of the people who end up causing destruction do so because there's some problem affecting them that's not being dealt with.

I think solving the socioeconomic, geopolitical, and religious tensions that lead to plane hijackings is a much harder problem to solve than simply putting doors on cockpits and forcing people to do body scans.

But it the long run we should maybe still attempt to solve it, before there are mandatory body scans everywhere and cars only start, if you do a mental examination first?

Exactly. That's treating a symptom, which creates more and more extreme symptoms. After a while though it's far more costly and complex to keep treating the wide variety of symptoms than it ever would've been to treat the cause, but because so much infrastructure has been built around treating those symptoms it's too difficult to dedicate resources to treating the cause.

How do you stop the hijacker blowing up the TSA queue instead?

Well that's easy, just add metal detectors and a pat-down at the entrance of the airport, before people queue up for TSA!

Just because it's impossible to solve a problem 100% doesn't mean that it's impossible to improve the state of things. Perfect is the enemy of good. There aren't that many people doing random chaotic damage, and it's not worth it to protect against all their potential harm.

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