The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2015)
medium.com
medium.com
Sometimes this enforcement of the most restrictive standard is a good thing, forcing people to write code that's safer, more testable, more portable, etc. More often IMX, it's just enforcing arbitrary choices and rewarding poor collaborative behavior in the process.
3 years ago, 55 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285545
4 years ago, 53 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567630
4 years ago, 20 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10687471
If I remember rightly, there was some interesting discussion of how accurate the claims made here were when it previously appeared on HN.
Edit: but it's not new. The idea that concentrated interests > diffuse interests was formulated by Olson in 1965, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
I've participated in a handful of standards committee type orgs. I so wish I had read Logic of Collection Action earlier. It might have saved me a great deal of heart ache.
I didn't know the author before, but looked him up and he seems to be a well known author of some very influential literature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
Hope that motivates hackers here to give this blog post a read.
Yeah, probably fault due to my own ignorance/bubble in which I live. But I like reading controversial but cleverly put together essays. I like it when someone challenges my own views with a well thought through argument, because that is the best way to either learn something new, or at least learn to understand other people better. So either way I feel like I always walk away as a winner whether I agree or disagree in the end. Thanks for the recommendation!
Try Chesterton then. A little old but still relevant. E.g. could try Heretics.
Or almost anything by Orwell; his crankiness knows no limits.
He's just one of today's "Lucky 10.000"[0]
[0] - https://xkcd.com/1053/
And his writing has improved.
Skin in the Game is the example heavy companion/ follow up to the more technical antifragile.
But he's also definitely over the hill as a thinker. About the only notable thing he's done in the last few years has been sustaining a long-running and personal feud with Nate Silver (of 538) about who among them better understands probability.
He has a really good rapport with the host (Russ Roberts) and it seems to tamper down his tendency to rant against the stupidity of others.
While his models provide an interesting lens they are applied selectively. Instead of looking at the picture holistically by examining if the mechanism he describes can be found everywhere (e.g. on both sides - and I believe it can), there is one side that has feature x and the other that hasn't.
If you look at the Brexit article in the same blog, he is eager to point out the mistakes of the intellectuals who are against Brexit. But he looses no word about the fallacies that made people actually vote for Brexit.
In the phenomenon described by the article, "minority" is the part that piques interest, but it's the "intolerant" aspect that's doing the real work.
Maybe it is an excerpt of the first manuscript of the book.
Other than that, I find the concept very interesting, but quite intuitive too.
(FYI, the actual stats are that only 30% of Indians are vegetarian, although the proportion varies quite a bit from state to state. Some states in the north are about 70% vegetarian and other states in the east are nearly 100% non-vegetarian. Your anecdata about how you couldn't find meat at a particular event should weighted appropriately based on these stats.)
He supports this by using the anecdotes about how airlines don't serve peanuts and how he had a social encounter where only kosher food was served. And from these two incidents, he jumps to the claim that "Europe will eat halal."
Notice he doesn't make the claim that Europe will increasingly offer halal food as an option. That would be a plausible result of having more Muslims in Europe and would in fact be equivalent to the Indian scenario where people are given a choice of vegetarian as well as meat options. But he says Europe will eat halal! If that were true, we should've seen India eat only vegetarian food given we have way more vegetarians than Europe has Muslims and yet that has not happened. Is this because Indian vegetarians -- of which I am one -- are uniquely tolerant, or is it because he is absurdly overstating his case? I think it's the latter.
There's no such thing as kosher/halal pork, and no such thing as vegetarian-approved filet mignon steak. People who can will still eat their pork and beef, rather than succumbing to the no-pork, no-meat practices of the minorities.
I said in my response to abiro that "easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated". Which is obviously true.
But that is a very inane and obvious claim, and not at all what NNT is saying. He claims the minority will "win" and that is not a claim he's able to support in any meaningful way. Unless we're redefining the the word "win" to mean something totally new and different, I think he's overstating his case.
They can tell the difference between a veggie burger and meat burger.
In your example the different views do not interfere. In society at large one can be vegetarian without forcing everyone to follow.
But when it is not possible or difficult to accommodate everyone then the most 'intolerant' and vocal may impose their view on the majority that does not have a strong view.
A common example is halal meat: If I sell fried chicken and some people absolutely demand that chicken be halal then I might just switch to halal chicken, i.e. all chicken will be halal.
Where I live the local primary school bans all nuts and all food containing nuts because of the 2% of children who have nut allergies.
Whether good, neutral, or bad, that's how it tends to work. The topic is overdramatised, though.
An "organic" apple is a substitute for "GMO" apple; in fact, it's so good a substitute most people from the indifferent majority wouldn't be able to tell organic from regular apart if not for the label. There's plenty of types of products where removing gluten also doesn't affect taste too much. In these cases letting the minority impose their desires is essentially free.
Vegetables are no substitute for meat. If you like meat, if you crave meat, you won't accept a tofu replacement. This makes it more difficult for vegetarianism achieve total domination. However, the effect still manifests itself clearly. Where I live, 15 years ago, vegetarianism was this weird thing from movies that nobody otherwise thought about. Today, every restaurant I can find has vegetarian options available and marked in the card, and whenever friends or I organize a get-together, the number one question is always "do we need a vegetarian menu?".
What I'm trying to push back against is Taleb's ridiculously broad statement that a tiny minority (only as much as 3-4% of the population) will force the entire population to submit to the minority's preferences. This is just not true.
References on beef consumption in India:
https://www.livemint.com/Politics/RhPVLUFmclIDWRIiSoTC7N/Who...
He's making a claim that minority preferences will "win" -- his word, not mine! That claim is not supported by anything at all in his argument, nor is it what you are claiming.
“Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with Kosher laws doesn’t change the price by much, not enough to justify inventories. But if the manufacturing of Kosher lemonade cost substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear proportion to the difference in costs. If it cost ten times as much to make Kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps in some very rich neighborhoods.”
> It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
It's a far cry from that claim -- that a minority as small as 3-4% can force the majority to submit to the will of the minority -- to the claim that a majority will accomodate a minority as long as extra cost incurred by the majority is not too much. The former is an unbelievably strong claim while the latter is obvious and inane.
The conventional wisdom is that normally the preferences of the majority prevail. Maybe it’s obvious to others, but I never thought about the minority rule explicitly before reading Taleb. And the rule has practical applications for privacy/climate activists, so I think it’s important not to dismiss it offhandedly.
For those actually interested in this stuff, beyond Taleb's stand-up routines, look up the work of Kurt Lewin, Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch, Phil Zambrado or Mel Slater. It's much more thought provoking.
These are very interesting times, because we finally have tons of data on how groups form, grow, break, merge etc And the ongoing merger of social psychology, political science, network theory as seen in the emergence of computational social science depts, doesn't just tell us how things work, but how to change and regulate the behavior and actions of groups. Early days but full of promise.
He's a smart guy, so he's no doubt fully aware of all the people you mention. He's also equally aware that he sells more books than all those people combined by probably a couple of order of magnitude.
Understanding > Knowledge
Taleb hammer is economists. All his nails are defined by that hammer. Yes, it's one way of trying to manage thoughts about the __complex__ world around us. But it's not complete. It doesn't always work. That hammer has blindspots.
You'd think Taleb would know this as well. But his hammer doesn't change. The least he can do, as every good argument should, is to mention the blindspots and how others might have insights. He leaves that out of the picture.
Given Taleb's theory...ironic, huh?
Gives zero fucks his arguments are not arguments at all. What a shame.
Yeah Gladwell. Comes up with a theory, then cherry-picks for studies that support it, but never mentions anything that doesn't.
What is your specific bone to pick with Taleb?
Ultimately, you're just spewing bullshit, and in many cases just trying to use to reputation as a (cheap) substitute for truth and fact. Again, such intellectual laziness should not be rewarded.
I'm not sure why we're grown so tolerant and accepting of what so often amounts to raw bullshit.
That's often an indicator that the content has been made inaccurate in the direction that people want to hear.
Take the halal example: as the author says, the kosher eater won't eat non-halal food, but non-kosher eaters don't mind eating halal. If it wasn't so, I don't think a Kosher minority would be able to impose anything.
Seems like the author is picking and choosing examples.
Even more absurd, when growing up in Brazil, the smoking section on the airline VASP (Viação Aérea São Paulo S/A) was the entire left side of the plane, i.e., to the left of the central aisle ... just an entertaining aside.
Malaysia Airlines happily gives out small pouches of salted peanuts to every passenger.
I flew from London to Florence last year. A passenger had peanut allergies. The flight did not serve any food at all because they can't guarantee any of their food doesn't contain peanuts. Peanut particles easily spread inside airplanes because air is recycled.