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Comment by jonesb6 | Hacker News Reader

For people in and around Paris right now the #PorteOuverte hash tag is being used to help shelter those who cannot make it home safely.

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This #PorteOuverte hashtag thing would be cool, if there weren’t a million people talking about how awesome the hashtag is, drowning out the ones actually offering shelter. I browsed through 20 pages of tweets with the hashtag, and only one out of hundreds was actually a Parisian looking for shelter, and none were people offering shelter. Most were talking about how great the hashtag is—inadvertently destroying its usefulness.

Welcome to twitter.

Be careful with that. This wouldn't be too hard:

1. Enter house claiming to need to go somewhere. 2. Kill everybody. 3. Move to next willing house and repeat.

Sure. But it is likely that the people attacking have a carefully orchestrated plan, and I doubt exploiting the rise of a social media hashtag is included within it. Of course, that's not to say there aren't opportunistic people out there, but...

Or the reverse. Enter house expecting safety, get killed.

How easy the social fabric can be unraveled :(

Destruction and creation are a-symmetrical. I had an interesting exchange with another HN'er not that long ago about that very topic. I ran a community of a million people and it took by my estimates less than 50 dedicated assholes to totally wreck it for everybody else. How they managed that and why I couldn't stop it is very much related to how 'open societies' are impossible to defend against a large enough number of idiots hell bent on destroying them. The ease with which you can destroy something has absolutely no bearing on the amount of hard work it took to create it. Societies are no different in this respect.

In my years and travels, I've settled on the fact that the only solution to those "assholes" that destroy community fabric is overwhelming force. You cannot reason with someone who has nothing to lose.

Which suggests an alternative (partial) solution: make sure that people in general have lots to lose especially those on the fringes of society.

Making sure everyone has something to lose means making sure everyone has fulfilling lifes they'd rather not jepordize with hostility.

The us and them mentality being used to "combat" terrorism is so harmful because it puts people in a position where they have nothing to lose - they're already being discrimminated against etc.

I agree that a few assholes can ruin things for everyone but the reason they can is because they can ruin the trust people have in each other thereby leading to a situation like I described above. The solution is therefore counterintuitive (since they exploit intuition).

This was actually successfully done. I'm having trouble finding the article, but basically a terrorist group (perhaps in Palestine) had trained some men specifically to be some of their most dedicated and zealous terrorists. However, the situation changed and they found that they no longer needed these zealots and had no idea what to do with them. So they held a mixer where the terrorists got to meet potential brides, and basically said that if they promised to live a normal life, they'd receive some financial compensation to get started on that normal life. All of the trainees ended up getting married and having families, and lost all desire to commit terrorist acts.

A very brief NPR commentary from 2005 was, I thought, remarkably prescient -- it draws many parallels between terrorists and gang members in the US (backgrounds of poverty, no job / life prospects, encouragement of elder males, etc).

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4256591

> make sure that people in general have lots to lose especially those on the fringes of society

What do you mean by this? It sounds a bit ominous, if you'll pardon me.

There is nothing ominous about it. A person that is happy, has a life and a means of self-support as well as a family is likely not going to be easily turned against society. On the other hand if every door you try to open is closed and you're being pushed into the corner of having 'nothing to lose' then you might be influenced in a negative way. So better to make sure people have plenty to lose.

This will probably never happen, though. Opening doors to people in any way like those who just committed acts of terrorism is far too much like giving in to the terrorists to be politically viable. And so, we'll keep on making sure that there are plenty of people with nothing to lose, and that the recruiters keep on finding plenty of willing recruits.

Oh. Thank you for clarifying.

There's a reason whether someone has life insurance is used as a signal when determining if they're a terrorist.

Unraveling of complex systems is very interesting discipline. We are so fragile. And we intentionally put resilience at the bottom of the priorities. Right now Europe needs people that refuse to be intimidated and simultaneously do not turn into bloodthirsty fiends. But we must have began the process of instilling said culture a decades ago.

This is the exact scenario I was worried about as well. Idea seems flawed security-wise; but then again in these kind of situations there is no real security.

I was wondering though if there are some creative ways to improve this initiative and make it more secure. Anyone has anything better than filtering eventual candidates to give shelter to according to rough "trustworthiness" of their Twitter account?

This is unnecessarily snarky. But many public buildings are offering shelter as well.

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