
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority - baq
https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
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nine_k
Highly duplicated:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%09The%20Most%20Intolerant%20W...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%09The%20Most%20Intolerant%20Wins&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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dijit
This is a very long-winded and wordy way of saying:

"People who distinguish between things will get their way because people who
don't distinguish between things rarely care."

Good example from the article: Halal food, non-halal eaters will eat halal,
but halal eaters will only eat halal.

So lets just make all things halal.

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nathanlied
It's not a very good example, because making food halal requires businesses to
change the way they do things. One of the things required for food to be halal
(AFAIK) is that the person doing the slaughtering must be Muslim. I can see
how this requirement would prevent most businesses from "making all things
halal", just by itself.

Besides, France's population is 5 to 10 percent Muslim, which negates the
"three to four percent" 'dictating' claim of the article, especially because,
last time I visited France, most meats I saw weren't halal.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
My understanding of halal is that an easy way for food to be halal is to be
vegetarian (in the ovo-lacto sense) and to contain no alcohol.

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unimpressive
As I've said before
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422420#12422841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12422420#12422841)):

My biggest problem with this Taleb piece is that it doesn't really take into
account the probability of success from a particular intolerant minority. In
practice there's a kind of signal-strength effect where the further up the
chain you go the less effective any one person becomes. (At least for the
extended GMO example.) Once you factor that into the model Taleb's argument
falls apart.

eg. Let's say a given family has a 25% chance of their intolerant child
swaying food preferences. (This is very generous, because I'm fairly sure in
practice it's under 5%.)

And we'll assume that going up the chain you need at least a 25% threshold to
accomplish anything. Then you're looking at multiplying probabilities that get
increasingly small the further up the chain you go.

The cool part of this is that you could probably write a quick model in your
language of choice to explore it.

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xrs
If commenter apathy is the reason we see this article several times a month,
allow me to chime in as a minority who is intolerant of repeat submissions.

