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Comment by wsxcde | Hacker News Reader

If this were true, then India would be a fully vegetarian country. Except it is not, and it is quite routine to find meat and fish served at public events here.

(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.)

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That doesn't seem to be a pure invalidation. Food that is not vegetarian is not the only food served to non-vegetarians since most people prefer a variety of meat and non-meat options when dining. Add to that the way food is prepared and served as separate dishes and that most vegetarians don't have a hard rule about not eating food that was near meat or slightly in contact with meat. It's easy enough to provide options for everyone when serving dinner or stocking a store so it is not necessary to make special affordances for vegetarians.

His argument is not that minorities are also provided options suitable to them when it is economical to do so. He makes a much stronger claim -- that minority preferences will "win".

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.

Neither halal-approved meat nor kosher-approved lemonade fundamentally change the taste and appearance the consumed product. The only costs to providing those options are an extra non-governmental "tax" in how the food is processed, regulated, and approved, and that cost is much less than the cost of not selling to those will only consume kosher/halal, or providing a second set of approved options to them.

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 think we're both saying the same things.

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.

A meat eater can’t tell the difference between halal and non halal.

They can tell the difference between a veggie burger and meat burger.

This is not the point.

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.

'Most Intolerant' is the key part. Indian vegetarians are far from it.

Other pointed out to costs, but I think the issue here might be substitution.

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?".

If the argument is that a majority will accommodate a minority as long as that accommodation is unnoticeable to most members of that majority, then I am totally on board with that claim.

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.

Specifically wrt to vegetarianism, non meat-eating Indians cannot be classified as intolerant (which is central to NNT's claim). Specific beef intolerance has become very vocal of late and you can see the effects across various parts of the country through local legislation banning beef sales and consumption. One could argue that this beef ban follows NNT's arguments.

The beef intolerance argument isn't convincing at all because an overwhelming majority of Indians don't eat beef. Taleb's argument is not that a majority can force its will on the minority, it is the exact opposite of that.

References on beef consumption in India:

https://www.livemint.com/Politics/RhPVLUFmclIDWRIiSoTC7N/Who...

https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-Indians-dont-eat-beef

The minority rule is about accommodating the preferences of the minority if it comes at low enough cost to the majority. Since forcing meat eaters to eat vegetarian is obviously problematic, the minority rule doesn’t come into effect, but since providing both vegetarian and meat options is relatively cheap, I assume you can find vegetarian food in most restaurants in India?

Except, the claim he's making is not that easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated. This is obviously true.

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.

Quoting the post:

“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.”

And again, I will offer in support of my case that meat is actually more expensive in India than are vegetables.

And steak is more expensive than french fries. People still eat steak. Cost is not the only metric.

The question is not the relative price of the goods, but the extra cost incurred by the majority to accommodate the minority. This might be hard to discern from the anecdotal style of the book, but this is the third most important factor after the stubbornness and an even geographical distribution of the minority.

Isn't that a much weaker claim you're making than what Taleb sets off to argue for in the beginning of the article? The article begins with the following:

> 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.

Depends on how you read it. What you quote is a nonrigorous statement of the minority rule. Given that he is writing pop science I think some laxity is permissible.

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.

Not eating meat (as a non-vegetarian) cost more than eating halal meat as a non-Muslim or drinking kosher juice as a gentile does.

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