Since this is Hacker News, I'll point out a way that this applies to programming: code standards and reviews. Time after time throughout my career, I've seen the most picky, idiosyncratic programmers impose their will on the rest of the project by their simple willingness to block commits until their whims are satisfied. Since review etiquette usually precludes a third person overriding another's pending objections to approve, the impasse is usually resolved by acceding to the bikeshedder's preference in the name of progress.
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.
Maybe we should put some of these perennial favourites on a schedule, we could use spaced repetition so they come up for discussion just when we need them.
or make it all forum like and pin it or make a pinned section and much like how it works no with posting and websites(though would need some smarts to discern possible context) defer to that.
Seems like an incredibly efficient way to farm karma. Identity posts in this category (3+ posts, each a year apart and gaining 50+ upvotes) and post them once the time is right (including the right time of the day — I remember seeing some analysis on this, and my own analytics show that SF/SV is a very large portion of HN traffic)
Its game theoretic framing of group decision making is seminal.
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 am surprised you have never heard of Taleb before. He is quite controversial, but often deeply original and almost never boring. You should read "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder" which imho is his best book. "Black Swan" is more well-known, but I was a slightly disappointed by it.
> I am surprised you have never heard of Taleb before. He is quite controversial, but often deeply original and almost never boring.
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!
>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,
Try Chesterton then. A little old but still relevant. E.g. could try Heretics.
Seinfeld effect RE: Black swan. The ideas have become pretty common place (though most uses of the phrase in the mainstream are incorrect) so they don't seem novel ~15 years later.
And his writing has improved.
Skin in the Game is the example heavy companion/ follow up to the more technical antifragile.
He has written some interesting stuff. In particular, I recommend his book the Black Swan -- it is a very nice description of why there are often structural incentives to disregard unlikely/low-probability events.
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.
The minority tyranny described in the article reminds me of the hidden power of the owner of any system. For example, a large technology company may own and operate a repository benevolently and graciously, but it always retains the power to make exceptions. So there may be an ecosystem of smaller businesses that grow up on that platform but if any of them interfere with the broader interests of the platform owner, the rules may change (subtly or not), in a unique action to save the owner's interest. This is an attribute of most platforms tools, currencies and systems, and I think is an important if unexamined feature of them.
After just reading the linked articles / chapter I was thinking: This is an interesting approach to look at the situation. After reading a couple of posts on this blog I can't shake off the feeling that the objective of his writing is being divisive to sell content.
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.
How about; *nix users 'refusing' to use closed source development tools and languages has led to Microsoft supporting/creating a lot of open source development tools and languages.
It's actually the reverse that happened. Windows was the "intolerant" option by the virtue of games almost universally being Windows-only. Only recently, as an increasing number of games is being released cross-platform, there's an uptick in Linux use on personal desktops/laptops.
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.
I would have expected this to be proof-read, as it is a direct excerpt taken from a book, but it is filled with mistakes. Spelling, grammar, word order...
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Someone needs to tell Taleb there is a field called Social Psychology where everything he is raving about is formally studied under the heading of Conformism or Group Dynamics.
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 writes pop science here in what is an entertaining style for many. (He does reference Serge Galam in his book, one of the fathers of modern sociophysics.)
Someone needs to tell Taleb there is a field called Social Psychology where everything he is raving about is formally studied
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.
Aware? Sure. But I think the comment is directed at a lack of understanding. That is:
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.
There are two "Nassim Taleb's" out in the world. Taleb the academic and Taleb the pop-culture author and their writing styles are completely different. The former actually tries to make a coherent argument while the latter is basically competing with Gladwell to sell as many books as possible and gives zero fucks that not all his arguments stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps that is Taleb's attempt at being Antifragile.
I was commenting on the comment, and rephrasing a bit for accuracy. That is, if you're being selective about the facts you present and you're not concerned about how solid your position is as a result, then you're not making an argument. Your intellectual laziness should not be rewarded.
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.
I get the feeling you don't think he is especially bright, which I must admit I didn't either, on the other hand if I thought he had all these insights on his own and did not have books to crib it from I would have to up my estimation.
It seems to me that the minority can dictate things that are inconsequential to the majority.
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 airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section)
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.
He's probably speaking mostly of European airlines.
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.
Since this is Hacker News, I'll point out a way that this applies to programming: code standards and reviews. Time after time throughout my career, I've seen the most picky, idiosyncratic programmers impose their will on the rest of the project by their simple willingness to block commits until their whims are satisfied. Since review etiquette usually precludes a third person overriding another's pending objections to approve, the impasse is usually resolved by acceding to the bikeshedder's preference in the name of progress.
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.
2 years ago, 214 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645
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.
Maybe we should put some of these perennial favourites on a schedule, we could use spaced repetition so they come up for discussion just when we need them.
or make it all forum like and pin it or make a pinned section and much like how it works no with posting and websites(though would need some smarts to discern possible context) defer to that.
Seems like an incredibly efficient way to farm karma. Identity posts in this category (3+ posts, each a year apart and gaining 50+ upvotes) and post them once the time is right (including the right time of the day — I remember seeing some analysis on this, and my own analytics show that SF/SV is a very large portion of HN traffic)
I had a low opinion of Taleb before, but this essay is actually pretty good.
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
Its game theoretic framing of group decision making is seminal.
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.
The title might suggest a poorly ranty written essay, but I was actually positively surprised and thought it was a very interesting read.
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.
I am surprised you have never heard of Taleb before. He is quite controversial, but often deeply original and almost never boring. You should read "Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder" which imho is his best book. "Black Swan" is more well-known, but I was a slightly disappointed by it.
> I am surprised you have never heard of Taleb before.
He's just one of today's "Lucky 10.000"[0]
[0] - https://xkcd.com/1053/
> I am surprised you have never heard of Taleb before. He is quite controversial, but often deeply original and almost never boring.
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!
>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,
Try Chesterton then. A little old but still relevant. E.g. could try Heretics.
Or Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell.
Or almost anything by Orwell; his crankiness knows no limits.
Seinfeld effect RE: Black swan. The ideas have become pretty common place (though most uses of the phrase in the mainstream are incorrect) so they don't seem novel ~15 years later.
And his writing has improved.
Skin in the Game is the example heavy companion/ follow up to the more technical antifragile.
Black Swan was just a simple analogy that the author decided to write an entire book about.
He has written some interesting stuff. In particular, I recommend his book the Black Swan -- it is a very nice description of why there are often structural incentives to disregard unlikely/low-probability events.
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.
Skin in the game is more recent.
Actually, skin in the game explains his feud with Nate Silver.
Then definately check his twitter, he is quite a figure:
https://twitter.com/nntaleb
I recommend his interviews on Econtalk: https://www.econlib.org/econtalk-by-featured-guest-and-lette...
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.
The minority tyranny described in the article reminds me of the hidden power of the owner of any system. For example, a large technology company may own and operate a repository benevolently and graciously, but it always retains the power to make exceptions. So there may be an ecosystem of smaller businesses that grow up on that platform but if any of them interfere with the broader interests of the platform owner, the rules may change (subtly or not), in a unique action to save the owner's interest. This is an attribute of most platforms tools, currencies and systems, and I think is an important if unexamined feature of them.
After just reading the linked articles / chapter I was thinking: This is an interesting approach to look at the situation. After reading a couple of posts on this blog I can't shake off the feeling that the objective of his writing is being divisive to sell content.
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.
Linux users are a minority, still we don't have a practically usable Linux on mobile phones.
Most Linux users are fine using any mobile OS, but most normal users won't use a non-polished linux.
The premise of this article might reason that Linux users (as the niche) can/will use non-linux systems, but the reverse is not true.
because those who won't use non-free systems haven't reached those magic 3% yet.
How about; *nix users 'refusing' to use closed source development tools and languages has led to Microsoft supporting/creating a lot of open source development tools and languages.
Are they intolerant as well? Just being minority doesn't cut it.
Perhaps the "minority" part doesn't matter, and it's just the (in)tolerance that matters.
It's actually the reverse that happened. Windows was the "intolerant" option by the virtue of games almost universally being Windows-only. Only recently, as an increasing number of games is being released cross-platform, there's an uptick in Linux use on personal desktops/laptops.
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.
I would have expected this to be proof-read, as it is a direct excerpt taken from a book, but it is filled with mistakes. Spelling, grammar, word order...
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.
Thought the same. It needs a good editor to take things out, his thoughts on lemonade aren't really necessary.
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.)
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.
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.
'Most Intolerant' is the key part. Indian vegetarians are far from it.
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.
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.
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
Someone needs to tell Taleb there is a field called Social Psychology where everything he is raving about is formally studied under the heading of Conformism or Group Dynamics.
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 writes pop science here in what is an entertaining style for many. (He does reference Serge Galam in his book, one of the fathers of modern sociophysics.)
I feel like we need a term for popsci like his and Jordan Peterson’s that instils in the reader an unearned feeling of elitism.
Insight porn.
Someone needs to tell Taleb there is a field called Social Psychology where everything he is raving about is formally studied
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.
Aware? Sure. But I think the comment is directed at a lack of understanding. That is:
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?
There are two "Nassim Taleb's" out in the world. Taleb the academic and Taleb the pop-culture author and their writing styles are completely different. The former actually tries to make a coherent argument while the latter is basically competing with Gladwell to sell as many books as possible and gives zero fucks that not all his arguments stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps that is Taleb's attempt at being Antifragile.
> " gives zero fucks that not all his arguments stand up to scrutiny."
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.
Seems like a pretty wide sweeping generalization to say his arguments are not arguments at all.
What is your specific bone to pick with Taleb?
I was commenting on the comment, and rephrasing a bit for accuracy. That is, if you're being selective about the facts you present and you're not concerned about how solid your position is as a result, then you're not making an argument. Your intellectual laziness should not be rewarded.
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.
He "sells" these ideas as if he was the first one to ever think of them.
> he sells more books than all those people combined by probably a couple of order of magnitude.
That's often an indicator that the content has been made inaccurate in the direction that people want to hear.
Being smart and being properly (academically) educated are two (very) different things.
Again, not to defend Taleb too much, but he does have just about every academic credential a person can have.
If you think Taleb's wrong, explain how!
I get the feeling you don't think he is especially bright, which I must admit I didn't either, on the other hand if I thought he had all these insights on his own and did not have books to crib it from I would have to up my estimation.
It seems to me that the minority can dictate things that are inconsequential to the majority.
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.
I wrote a post few month ago on how the minority rule could be leveraged to bring privacy to personal payment apps: https://agost.blog/2019/06/mapping-crypto-minority-rule/
>> (even airplanes had, absurdly, a smoking section)
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.
> Which explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes
Malaysia Airlines happily gives out small pouches of salted peanuts to every passenger.
He's probably speaking mostly of European airlines.
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.
Particles don't spread easily, the air is filtered aggressively.
@dang article is from 2016