The Dictatorship of the Small Minority by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
medium.com
medium.com
It makes sense, though: if, say 10%, of folks will ONLY eat Organic and the remaining, say 90%, will eat Organic or GMO with equal preference, it makes your supply chain much easier to supply ONLY Organic food while still accessing 100% of the market. If you supply both types, you have a more complex supply chain, and if you supply ONLY GMO, you give up on 10% of the market.
Anyway, I'm probably making his point for him, but Taleb's anti-expert bias can drive me up the wall.
Indeed, that is why I couldn't make it past the second chapter of Antifragile. His insistence on citationless, just-so stories to explain everything (in his world everything has a snarky one-liner explanation) make his writing a huge turn-off to me. I'm surprised about his popularity in the HN crowd since I would expect engineers to insist on statements being backed up by evidence.
However, this article contains some good insights. Although it was permeated with matter-of-fact insults to practically every group of people, the insults were less vicious than those of many of his other works.
Anti-(established)-expert bias and reducing complex problems and their solutions to clever (and often, though not always, snarky) one-liners are kind of bread-and-butter of the startup world.
Reading part 1, I thought "Oh God, ____ is right, the man is an idiot." I realised, though, that he simply wasn't all that good a writer, which is not the same thing. I also got the impression that he was indulging in stylistic experiments, which detracted from the book. Anyway, one or two good ideas in there, and a nice discussion of Hempel's Raven Paradox (even better than Gardner's, so score one for him). But mostly part 1 was a matter of slogging through a lot of text for little reward.
Part 2 got a bit more interesting, though here ____'s second claim of "the good parts aren't original and the original parts aren't good" was sadly borne out. Some decent material, but mostly stuff I'd read in lots of other places, pulled together into (to be fair) a pretty coherent narrative.
Part 3, surprisingly enough, got a lot more interesting. I'm not sure what the difference was, but it did seem that he was genuinely offering insights of his own, rather than regurgitating other people's. He did also seem to have some genuinely valuable stuff to say. At any rate, I found myself reading the rest of the book with a lot more engagement and a lot less feeling of having to slog through it.
On the whole, I think he does have a few genuine, and genuinely insightful points to make, shadowed by his rather clunky writing style and by the fact that he's rather full of himself. I think I will reread the book a chapter at a time, to make sure I get his point.
They're cultivated in the sense that their seeds are propagated and they're cared for. Concerns about artificial selection used for tens of thousands of years might be dismissed as a naturalistic fallacy, and more surgical genetic engineering methods only introduced last century are difficult to distinguish in a meaningful way. However, example disasters from introducing species to ecosystems suggest that the conservative biases that partly make up the naturalistic fallacy would have sometimes lead to safer outcomes.
In spite of these disasters though, it seems that the planet would not have a carrying capacity of 8 billion people without the inorganic advances of the green revolution. Nor, perhaps even conditions where probably half a billion of those people have a higher quality of life than the most fortunate 100 thousand people living two hundred years ago.
As a non-Muslim in upstate NY I see Halal meat as a net positive influence. It enables a local alternative supply chain for meat: some restaurants around here sell really delicious meat, often things like lamb and goat you don't see every day. Also a lot of non-Muslim farmers can make a living because of this supply chain.
I think about theology too and I see kosher/halal as giving respect to the animal like (1) indigenous hunters do, and (2) a bit like Christians saying grace. You might say Roman style animal sacrifice is barbaric and it is but offering something people will consume is not.
By definition this kind of order relationship is a marker of «power» struggle.
Let's take the example of the kosher/allahl for instance, in a term of organoleptic quality kosher/allahl is the same as normal food. So rigourously on the level that that matters the minority is not harming the majority, except that ritual are first increasing the costs of food, secondly being used to found some «religious mafia».
Do you want your everyday food when you are in the majority of the atheists / not very praticant religious people found proselytism?
Should the tolerant people be forced to found intolerance?
Second example; the peanuts/gluten/allergy free food: it seems harmless, isn't it?
Except that early exposure to allergens is strongly suspected (see amish) to help build resistance to allergies & asthma (see toys dolls). Thus, selling exclusively allergens free food diminishes the risks for a minority at the price of exposing the young majority to even more problems in the future.
Having recently met too much healthy food delirant retarded for my own sanity, they often blame their allergies to «the lack of hygiene» (they often correlate with poverty), and imposes their food choices to the majority.
This question of the power of any group (whatever their size is) is a classical of the social contract where the Nation is supposed to limit freedom in regard of the common interest. It is a protestant way of thinking.
It is an interesting principle, and useful to keep in mind, but I do not think it really supports all of the points he makes with it, or justify some of the language used. For example, I do not think that all drinks being Kosher, or a high prevalence of halal butcher shops, merit being described as "dictatorships". In the examples that would merit such strong language, such as the possibility of an anti-democratic religion dominating a democratic society and culture, I do not think that the Power of Asymmetry Principle leads where he tries to go. Specifically, he says that we need to be "more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities". However, if we examine the situation while keeping the power of asymmetry in mind, all we need to do is look for the asymmetry that would give this group its power, and take that away. In this case, the ability to use violence to enforce religious rules, specifically the death penalty for apostasy. Without the threat of violence, fundamentalist Islam would look much more like fundamentalist Christianity, trying (with various levels of success) to enforce its norms through political and interpersonal channels, but far from an unstoppable juggernaut.
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates.
In the end, Rome destroyed Carthage.