
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2015) - dustinmoris
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
======
notacoward
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.

------
makomk
2 years ago, 214 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16454645)

3 years ago, 55 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12285545)

4 years ago, 53 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567630)

4 years ago, 20 comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10687471](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.

~~~
pharke
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.

~~~
flixic
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)

------
cousin_it
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action)

~~~
specialist
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.

------
dustinmoris
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb)

Hope that motivates hackers here to give this blog post a read.

~~~
lqet
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.

~~~
dustinmoris
> 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!

~~~
coldtea
> _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.

~~~
kthejoker2
Or Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell.

Or almost anything by Orwell; his crankiness knows no limits.

------
drtillberg
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.

------
cJ0th
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.

------
amelius
Linux users are a minority, still we don't have a practically usable Linux on
mobile phones.

~~~
drieddust
Are they intolerant as well? Just being minority doesn't cut it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

------
glastra
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.

~~~
eythian
Thought the same. It needs a good editor to take things out, his thoughts on
lemonade aren't really necessary.

------
wsxcde
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.)

~~~
pharke
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.

~~~
wsxcde
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.

~~~
nwatson
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.

~~~
wsxcde
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.

------
hos234
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.

~~~
dagw
_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.

~~~
chiefalchemist
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?

~~~
dagw
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.

~~~
chiefalchemist
> " 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.

~~~
andreilys
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?

~~~
chiefalchemist
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.

------
robteix
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.

------
abiro
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/](https://agost.blog/2019/06/mapping-crypto-minority-
rule/)

------
nwatson
>> (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.

------
odiroot
> 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.

~~~
dannyr
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.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Particles don't spread easily, the air is filtered aggressively.

------
Dowwie
@dang article is from 2016

