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Comment by abiro | Hacker News Reader

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.”

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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.

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