
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority [pdf] - kawera
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/minority.pdf
======
dang
Taleb should include the famous line from Shaw's _Man and Superman_ that fits
this idea:

 _The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man._

~~~
privong
I think the idea is accurate. But it's worth noting that not everything
done/advocated by the unreasonable person is "progress".

~~~
barry-cotter
Progress is just change that the writer agrees with.There is no objective
morality and the ""long arch to justice" is just a random walk.

~~~
RodericDay
This is an ignorant thing to say. "Moral realism" vs. "Moral anti-realism" is
a discussion that, afaik, Moral realists have the upper hand in.

~~~
grinnbearit
Moral realists have the upper hand? Are you willing to share some articles
covering the topic?

For example, [http://slatestarcodex.com/](http://slatestarcodex.com/) and
[http://lesswrong.com/](http://lesswrong.com/) have plenty of essays arguing
for moral subjectivity.

~~~
RodericDay
Not really, I can't do the debate justice on a tiny HN discussion box. You can
go on r/AskPhilosophy and ask them about it. You can also seek out Derek
Parfit or something.

But, it doesn't matter if you personally agree with moral realism or not. What
matters is that it is controversial and that there is no philosophical
consensus. As such, to claim that "there is no objective morality" as
axiomatic, is to end an argument before it has begun.

edit: Also, I think LessWrong-types cling on hard to a kind of logical
positivism that is philosophically pretty primitive. The most exciting way to
study this is via Wittgenstein, probably. He was their foremost figure, and
then he turned on them. If you don't want to delve into philosophy, try to
read his biography by Ray Monk- "Duty of Genius". I think any techie could
follow it and enjoy it.

~~~
grinnbearit
Thanks for the tips, r/AskPhilosophy has a lot of discussion on the topic. I
am also interested to know why you seem to prefer Moral Realism.

> As such, to claim that "there is no objective morality" as axiomatic, is to
> end an argument before it has begun

I don't take that as axiomatic actually, unlike scientific research where we
have an objective, consistent universe to compare against, moral objectivity
seems to either come from group consensus (which doesn't guarantee
correctness) or at an extreme moral naturalism which has fairly horrible
implications[1]. Without an objective, consistent source, how would we get
objective, consistent morals?

[1] slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

~~~
RodericDay
It's just a very complex topic. IIRC, there's a user called ReallyNicole on
AskPhilosophy, who specializes in Moral philosophy, and makes really good
breakdowns about it periodically. Try to seek them out.

As far as HN is concerned, though, I think you should focus on this statement
by my parent:

> _Progress is just change that the writer agrees with.There is no objective
> morality and the ""long arch to justice" is just a random walk._

I don't think this is a good comment, or good attitude to bring into political
discussion. You may not be able to pin down the notion of "Love" or "Art" or
even "Game" to a definition, but they are still "real" enough as far as
Philosophical Realism is concerned (here is where Wittgenstein may be useful),
to discuss. To make quippy comments about how "there is no progress" seems to
me like a cheap argumentative ploy in favor of a "fuck you got mine" life
philosophy.

The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are
"arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely as
we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and lazy.

I am a scientist, and I feel like sciency analogies to philosophical concepts
are almost always dodgy, but I will try anyway: To me, it seems similar on
some level to say that, because the particles of gas in a room could be here,
or could be there agglomerated on a corner, there is no meaningful way in
which we can talk about the temperature of a room. Truth is, some combinations
and permutations have been observed to be way more likely than others, way
before we could meaningfully articulate the underlying mechanisms with
anything rigorous.

This doesn't mean that the radically opposite conclusion is true either. You
could go all the way against "there's no arc of justice", and become a
Fukuyamaist or a Spanish Inquisitor: "there is an arc of justice, and it bends
towards _this_ ". This is not a necessary outcome of Moral Realism though.
Moral realism, to me, basically seems to say, that ethics and morality is not
a "nonsense" discussion topic (again: Wittgenstein).

~~~
grinnbearit
> The idea that women's liberation and the abolishment of slavery are
> "arbitrarily" positive things, and that we may like them exactly as likely
> as we may not via some senseless quirk of history, seems pretty asinine and
> lazy.

Its not exactly arbitrary, its more dependent on the current state of the
world. Take the trolley problem, if killing one person would save billions
does murder become moral?

Similarly, (and more contentiously) we might look at pre industrial agrarian
societies as barbaric for favouring male children but when your society/family
is absolutely dependent on human labour and men are capable of providing far
more for roughly the same amount of resources consumed you can see how that
moral position could emerge.

Were they fundamentally evil for holding it?

* [http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pd...](http://robinhanson.typepad.com/files/three-worlds-collide.pdf) is short story which also talks about this.

------
probdist
I'm interested in thinking through several examples on this subject.

One example that comes to mind with me is the campaign by many university
student groups across the country to encourage endowments to divest from
fossil fuel companies. For example:
[http://www.fossilfreeuc.org/](http://www.fossilfreeuc.org/)
[http://www.fossilfreemit.org/](http://www.fossilfreemit.org/) . The the vocal
minority on this subject is very strongly in favor of their opinion
(divestment), whereas the larger mass of students mostly doesn't care about
the issue or perhaps leans to not divesting but only slightly.

It is interesting to consider the more detailed results of this where people
don't have 0 cost acquiescence, for example if people really wanted some non-
kosher soda it would still exist in the marketplace.

It is also interesting how this phenomena occurs in voting schemes where you
have a fixed number of voting points to distribute over all issues up for
consideration. In such systems people can have their minority issues more
strongly represented.

------
oldboyFX
Political correctness is another great example of how the most (in)tolerant
wins.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dNbWGaaxWM)

~~~
vlehto
A friend of mine is some kind of leader in border patrol. He said that he
knows he is in real trouble the moment his dudes stop trash talking him. In
most sausage fests it's like this. Offensive remark is actually flattering, as
it's completely based on assumption that the receiving party is confident
enough to take the joke.

It's at least seemingly male cultural phenomena. Or alternatively women are
really really careful about it.

~~~
MollyR
I've noticed this too. I have a couple guy friends.They are really good
friends, but they trash talk each other . . . all the time . . . They usually
laugh uproariously about it too. If you didn't know them, you'd think they
hated each other. It's definitely a different way of social interaction than I
have with my friends.

------
dasyatidprime
C2Wiki has some discussion of a related phenomenon of asymmetrical decision-
making:
[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeastFlexibleProtocolWins](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeastFlexibleProtocolWins)

The surrounding cluster of pages there may also be useful for people curious
about this topic.

------
teddyh
A very related concept is the Overton window:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)

------
guard-of-terra
This is why non-minorities should set limits for tolerance to avoid recursive
renormalization as described in the article.

Otherwise we end up being different people without desiring that.

Of course we should let good examples transform our society, but not
opinionated minorities.

~~~
danharaj
There are no non-minorities in the abstract. Majority and minority only arise
when one names the thing that differentiates them.

What examples do you have in mind?

------
crystal2
I saw this happening in real-life. A minority political party insists on
dividing a state and a minority of people do support it. Majority parties
didn't dare to go against it for the fear of loosing votes from those minority
people. When a referendum was called for, no one spoke against the division
though a large majority of people and political parties did feel it as crazy.
Also they didn't believe it would really happen. But it happened and the state
is divided against the feelings of the people. People are still a state of
shock.

------
temo4ka
Also next chapter:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10455681)

------
asgard1024
So, the "tyranny of the majority" is an illusion of those who are highly
intolerant?

~~~
jokoon
Inaction and the consent of the majority is more what you mean. The majority
doesn't force anything on you, it's just that it would be counter productive
to fight the current.

There are accepted norms which are accepted by the majority for historical
reasons, but also because people believe the norm seems both honest and
accepted by many of who they see as honest people who are similar to them. So
the norm is not just something you agree with, it's something consider to be
decent and can be consented to.

In society there is always one big dominant river which current is going in
one direction. That's the social contract. If you don't have one rule for
everyone, there is no society.

------
hibikir
What interests me is the opposite situation: When a minority imposes itself
not because they can force themselves on others, because they are immune to
external influence. It's the same principle.

We see a lot of that in OSS, and I've seen it happen in companies: Bad
behavior designed to make dissenting opinion go away (when sometimes the
dissenting opinion is to just not be insulting), runs amok, and forces the
lowest common denominator of behavior.

So IMO, it's not really about tolerance or intolerance, but about which side
allows itself to be influenced, either by law, or pressure. When enough
pressure to make someone resign is stronger, you end up with an environment
where the intolerant wins. But in an environment where this doesn't happen,
it's the people who have more to lose by leaving that wins. You can imagine
how that is not helpful in a company: It's normally your best employees that
have better alternatives when they leave.

Another important part is whether we really know everyone's opinion. When an
opinion is considered impolite, we will think it's less popular than it really
is, because people that share it will just be quite about it. It's one of the
reasons we've seen quick changes of opinion in topics like Gay marriage: It's
not that opinions change that quickly, but that what was considered the
"polite opinion" has had a big reversal. So it isn't just about tolerance.

Ultimately what matters is, who really wins? An OSS project that kicks people
out, for one mechanism or the other, wins when it keeps the most value. Maybe
removing dissent is helpful. Maybe the dissent was making things better. So
whether this effect is good, or bad, happens in a case by case basis.

------
erikb
The title seems to be about something totally different than the article. Does
the most powerful minority win? Sure. Does the most intolerant and stubborn
win? Certainly not, at least in the long run.

Yes, you can smoke at a trainstation, or suicide bomb yourself to death in
front of a football stadium. But that is only a success of your agenda in the
very short term. If most of your coworkers are non smokers and you annoy them
too often with your smoke, you lose their support in the long run and thereby
your ability to push your agenda.

On the other hand we know that the straight white male is the default for our
society beside being the biggest group, reason being that his agenda is
integrated well in our world definition through media, history, etc. He
doesn't win, because he's more stubborn. He wins because 90% of movies show
him as the role model. You can be a very stubborn black woman but that won't
make you rich and won't make people try to be like you, it won't enable you to
push your agenda.

~~~
pedalpete
I thought something similar, but upon reading your comment and closer
inspection, it seems Taleb is focusing on rules not actions (though I only got
part way through the article).

For example, eating Kosher or Halal is a rule and he is saying that by a
minority following this rule, all of us end up by default following the rule.

Suicide bombing or smoking is an action which we don't inherently take. We are
eating already, so eating kosher or halal isn't a huge difference.

------
dsfyu404ed
tl;dr It's like a committee revising something they don't have strong feelings
about just to get a member with a strong opinion to STFU about it

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Why do I care if I eat Halal or Kosher, if I don't care whether I eat Halal or
Kosher?

Isn't that the bottom line? That in a reasonably democratic society, the
majority makes way for the minority? Otherwise it's not a democratic society,
it's apartheid.

~~~
mhurron
> That in a reasonably democratic society, the majority makes way for the
> minority? Otherwise it's not a democratic society, it's apartheid.

Would not an unregulated democratic society not care to cater to the wishes of
a minority? In a raw democracy if the majority did not observe Kosher or
Halal, that nation would not see an issue with making it illegal. That a
minority did follow it would not matter, the majority had ruled.

Individual and minority rights are protected in the US is because there are
laws in place to restrict the simply majority rule to prevent the above from
occurring. Those controls were put in place having recognized the limitations
of majority rule in antiquity, it is not a property of a democratic society.

Apartheid was racial segregation in South Africa and doesn't appear to apply
here.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
> In a raw democracy if the majority did not observe Kosher or Halal, that
> nation would not see an issue with making it illegal.

The thing is, you can't "oberve" kosher or halal unless you actually believe
in them.

I'm neither jewish nor muslim, but I was brought up christian, so here's an
example I'm familiar with: if a priest sprinkled my food with holy water, my
only concern would be hygiene; if the water was clean and he hadn't, say, used
it to wash his flock's feet beforeheand, then I could care less. Or I might
mind if the food was such that sprinkling water over it could make it worse
somehow- I can't think of an example.

The point is, I don't believe in the supernatural. Some people do and they
insist on imbuing real-world stuff with supernatural meaning. As long as the
way they choose to do so has no real-world, tangible effect on me then I don't
care, they can knock themselves out.

In short: people can believe anything they like about our common lives. As
long as it's supernatural, it doesn't affect me. It's not real. I don't care
about what's not real.

Accordingly, I don't see why halal and kosher should be made illegal. People
should be free to believe in the supernatural if they so choose. Why would a
democracy impose a specific set of beliefs on its people? In what sense would
you say that such a democracy could be considered "unregulated" (let alone a
democracy in the first place)?

------
anon4
I wish Taleb would stop making up weird phrases and pushing them in his
writing. What does "skin in the game" even mean? I mean linguistically. It's a
weird phrase that I still have trouble parsing and have to stop and think
every time I see it. Why not "involvement"? Why "game"? Which meaning of
"game" is even in this? Does he mean "have a portion of the skin of the game
animal that would be killed at the end of the hunt allotted to you"? Or is it
"to wager some of one's own skin on the outcome of a game"? But then your skin
isn't really in the game per se, is it? As in, it doesn't take active part in
the game, right? So how is it "in" the "game"? It just hurts my head :(

~~~
tetrep
It's not a phrase made up by Taleb.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_game_(phrase)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_in_the_game_\(phrase\))

------
danharaj
The basic principle of Radical Democracy, which is different from Liberal
Democracy, is relevant here:

> "Radical democracy" means "the root of democracy." Laclau and Mouffe claim
> that liberal democracy and deliberative democracy, in their attempts to
> build consensus, oppress differing opinions, races, classes, genders, and
> worldviews. In the world, in a country, and in a social movement there are
> many (a plurality of) differences which resist consensus. Radical democracy
> is not only accepting of difference, dissent and antagonisms, but is
> dependent on it.

(Wikipedia)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_democracy)

This article can be interpreted as evidence that radical democracy actually
works and the root of democracy ought to be a diversity of minorities all
advocating for things we could call their essential beliefs, and a healthy,
free society is one in which on any given issue the majority is flexible
enough to accommodate minorities that have stronger preferences.

That is, a prosperous, cohesive society isn't one that tends to homogeneity
but is instead driven by its heterogeneity. Furthermore, a prosperous,
cohesive society isn't based on rigid principles, but flexibility and the
ability to evolve its structures to accommodate more and more diverse groups.

Seems legit to me. Most homogeneous groups in history seem to either arise
from a founder effect or maintain their homogeneity through dehumanizing
tribalism and Incredible Violence.

~~~
scottlocklin
"Most homogeneous groups in history seem to either arise from a founder effect
or maintain their homogeneity through dehumanizing tribalism and Incredible
Violence."

Yeah, sort of like the inhomogeneous groups in history acquire their
inhomogeneity through dehumanizing tribalism and (nothing incredible about it
-it's just human nature) violence. Take the British Empire for example. They
deliberately moved people around their empire to keep their subjects angry at
each other rather than at themselves; Indian rubber tappers and Chinese
merchants in Malaysia, Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland, Indians
shipped to Kenya, etc. Worked for a few hundred years. Arguably, the modern
neoliberal system is an extension of this to the modern day.

Taleb's argument doesn't seem to be in favor of any flavor du jour of
democracy. More an exposition of how things work in complex pluralistic social
systems, democracy or no. Ornery minorities in a pluralistic society end up
getting their way most of the time. As all of western civilization seems
determined to become some kind of ornery minority, the next 20 years should be
pretty interesting.

~~~
danharaj
I think I didn't communicate clearly what I meant. I think my response to a
sibling comment clarifies my observation:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10571763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10571763)

I'm not sure what you mean about "western civilization" becoming an ornery
minority but it gives me a sense of "barbarians at the gates" sort of
thinking. Could you clarify?

~~~
scottlocklin
Western civilization is very obviously dissolving itself into tiny balkanized
minorities, consisting of perpetually aggrieved people whining at each other
in a sort of victim olympics in hopes of status payouts and vague grubbings
after ephemeral power. Taleb's hack applied on a wide scale by everyone
against everyone else. There are passages on the subject in Thucidides,
Ammianus Marcellinus and probably lots of other places...

Anyway, civilizations get sick and die: there is nothing I can do about it
beyond scowling at the imbecile descendants of the people who once sent men to
the moon. At least China seems to have walked away from its suicide attempt.

