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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

In extreme cases you have evaporative heating of groups where after some major setback all the more moderate members leave and the remainder are on average more attached to the group and more fanatical. This is pretty common to see when religious cults have prophesies that fail to pan out.

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Perfect description. I also see this happening in newly formed political parties over here in Europe, political parties that were marketing themselves at the beginning as "anti-system" (i.e. different compared to the old, established political parties) and such.

Initially they were attracting quite a diverse bunch, which is good imo, as political parties should represent swathes of the population as large as possible, but as the time progressed and as the disillusions started to show up their ranks got thinner and the only people left were the "more fanatical" ones, as you well put it. Unfortunately doing politics with "fanatical" people is very unproductive and border-line dangerous for the fabric of society.

Not sure if there's a way out of situations like these.

The WSJ had a piece many years ago about this happening to the Muslim Brotherhood as the moderate members, who were more visible and accessible, were arrested forcing the group to become more fundamentalist. Found that interesting. "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems..."

I never did validate if that claim about the Muslim Brotherhood stood the test of time but I found the thing interesting in the moment.

the new vintage of Hamas, brought to you by Israeli intelligence

Isn't Hamas an example of the opposite dynamic--of becoming less fanatical? Yes, Hamas leads violent, armed protests from the Gaza Strip. But there's arguably been less violence compared to the armed conflicts they induced on and across the Lebanese border. Once they began to independently govern (not withstanding lack of Israeli recognition) the Gaza Strip they had to soften their stance somewhat, similar to the PLO, which is an even better example.

This points in the direction of another commenter who mentioned that it's a matter of incentives. Yes, many groups are seemingly defined by their particular disposition on certain issues. But toss some strong incentives into the mix and some of those groups turn out to not be quite as intransigent as thought. Although the Hamas and PLO duo shows the limits to that--Hamas responded to incentive, but definitely not as strongly as the PLO did, perhaps precisely because the PLO holds the more moderate ground, and Hamas as a group distinguishes itself from the PLO in that way. I'd wager that if you could magically extinguish the PLO, then it's likely Hamas would either become more moderate or split in order to fill that vacuum.

> not withstanding lack of Israeli recognition

Israel recognizes Gaza (as something else than Israel at least.)

It is mostly journalists (and internet forums) that conflates Gaza with an open air prison.

I think the OP meant that Israel doesn't officially recognize Hamas rule over Gaza (because Hamas is a terrorist organization, and it also doesn't recognize Israel). But Hamas de facto rules over Gaza, and as a result they have (slightly) moderated their behavior.

It's true that Israel does not consider Gaza to be Israeli territory, nor does it want to annex Gaza. And it hasn't actually occupied Gaza since Ariel Sharon as PM ordered the IDF to unilaterally withdraw, although Israel and Egypt do maintain a shared blockade of Gaza.

Thanks, you wrote it in a very clear way.

I think we should note though that the Egyptian blockade of Gaza seems far stricter than the Israeli one (which just seems to control that weapons and things that can easily be used to create weaponry or tunnels aren't brought in).

> things that can easily be used to create weaponry

Just to be clear, this means items like food, paper and any and all electronics.

Israel maintains a strict calorie limitation on Gaza, because Hamas turns any excess into rockets. Of course, this doesn't actually deter Hamas that much, because they care about shooting at Israel more than they care about the health of the population, and so a huge portion of the population of Gaza is chronically malnourished.

> Just to be clear, this means items like food, paper and any and all electronics.

You'll find that if you look behind Hamas approved sources (not Israeli propaganda, but local sources in Gaza) you might get a mlre nuanced view.

> and so a huge portion of the population of Gaza is chronically malnourished.

The problem in Gaza does not seem to be the supply of food but the distribution. Hamas is notoriously corrupt and evil as written about in length by their own. To them I guess it is even beneficial if their people us malnourished when journalists and UN officials arrive.

Besides: Hamas needs only to start behave civilized, start imprisoning the violent ones instead of sending grants to martyrs and you will probably find Israelis a lot more cooperative vs now when they openly say they want to destroy Israel.

We're talking about the 80s here, when they wanted the PLO to be taken down a notch

Hamas used to be worse - at least to Israelis. They are still as far as I know foul to their own people, but of that we don't know too much on the outside.

There is a reason these walls etc exist now and that is because when I was younger, reading about buses getting bombed or civilians machine gunned in Israel was totally unsurprising.

Or they accomplish their goal and everyone who isn't an extremist says it's mission accomplished and starts caring about other things leaving only extremists to chart the group's direction. MADD is a good example.

*Evaporative cooling

I think he meant to write heating. Because the moderate (slow) parts leave, keeping the 'hot' members.

He meant to write cooling; the moderate (warmer) parts leave, leaving the fanatical 'cold' members. I agree that 'fanatical=cold/moderate=warm' seems a little backwards, but it's that way and not the other because it's an analogy to a real physical process, while evaporative warming doesn't exist.

From 2007: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooling_(atomic_ph...

Distillation may be a more appropriate analogy. The unwanted part evaporates away, leaving the more concentrated solution behind.

In distillation, the whole input liquid is evaporated by heating, then condensed by cooling and collected.

That depends on whether you want the more volatile or less volatile liquid at the end.

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