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In general, superstitious behavior tends to win over non-superstitious behavior, even if it is a small minority. For example, say there are two communities in

• grenoire 8y ago
  Taleb has a piece on this exact observation https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
  • amelius 8y ago
    How would it apply to slavery? I.e., a small but not insignificant portion of people thought that slavery was bad (namely the slaves themselves). Yet, slavery continued for quite a long time.
    • chr1 8y ago
      This wouldn't apply at all, because the majority needs to be indifferent, and there should be no other minority demanding the opposite.
• namaemuta 8y ago
  Exactly what is happening with planes. I'm still astonished every time I get into one and see the missing row 13. It's so ridiculous...
  • OnionBlender 8y ago
    Some buildings don't have any floors labeled with a 4 because it is unlucky in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerology#Four https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerology#Four
    • sampo 8y ago
      In the future we might have array libraries that provide arrays that don't have the 4th element.
      • alboy 8y ago
        That's preposterous, they should just throw an UnluckyIndexAccessException depending on the host's locale.
        • randomdata 8y ago
          But only after the software is in production, at some random time.
  • Krasnol 8y ago
    Especially if you are superstitious and sit in row 14, you must know that this is actually row 13 undercover!
    • gerbilly 8y ago
      Don't forget to also avoid row 12 just to be sure! They could have counted the seats from zero, but labelled them from 1.
      • dwighttk 8y ago
        Most planes I’ve noticed start at like row 4
  • tim333 8y ago
• avian 8y ago
  I don't buy this argument. It works for things like "unlucky" numbers others mention, where there is basically no economic side effect (outside superstitious group no one cares about their seat number) Shops that didn't sell black doors would be losing business from non-superstitious people looking to buy black doors, which might be a bigger factor if superstitious group is relatively small. I think adult content is more similar to black doors than seat numbers.
  • jonnycomputer 8y ago
    I think the OP was not speaking about selling black doors, but having black doors in their shop, e.g. the entrance.
  • coldtea 8y ago
    >Shops that didn't sell black doors would be losing business from non-superstitious people looking to buy black doors, which might be a bigger factor if superstitious group is relatively small. It's not about selling, is about having black doors of your store. If 10% of the people absolutely refused to go through a black door (because of some BS religious reason for example), stores would either paint their black doors some other color, or lose 10% of potential customers. Guess what most will chose. The 90% of the people who are indifferent to door color wont make any difference. Here's a better version of the argument: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
  • graeme 8y ago
    They mean the entry door of the shop, not what the shop sells.
• grbr 8y ago
  that's another example of Popper's paradox of tolerance.
  • naasking 8y ago
    > Popper's paradox of tolerance. Except there's zero empirical data to support the existence of this alleged "paradox". In the meantime, it's used to justify all sorts of intolerance of its own. Paradox indeed.
• pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Depends on the superstition, if it were "you should say 'black door' every time you see one [and you'll have good luck]" then it would make no difference. It would neither inhibit nor encourage those of the out-group. Let's look at religion: if my religion says "give money to orphans" then you don't need to fight it, it doesn't harm you, if it says "make everyone who's not part of our group subservient or dead" then you must fight it. Actively fighting a superstition that is not harmful would count as it's own superstition, it's not logically driven.
  • appleflaxen 8y ago
    "give money to orphans" isn't superstition - it's charity, and is being done for an actual good (amelioration of poverty). Superstition by definition is when the true utility is zero, and the imagined utility is >0.
  • deytempo 8y ago
    I would say that fighting the mindset that leads to superstitious notions would be the most logical. It isn’t necessary to be superstitious if one is educated about biases and logic
  • mk89 8y ago
    > Let's look at religion: if my religion says "give money to orphans" then you don't need to fight it, it doesn't harm you, if it says "make everyone who's not part of our group subservient or dead" then you must fight it. Go and tell the legislators. Where does the fight start, and where does it end? And what's the consequence of "we (the people who don't believe it) need to fight it"? I ask you these questions because they are really issues we are facing as a society based on freedom of speech (and religion).
  • kgwxd 8y ago
    "give money to orphans" is harmful to you when the target is your 90 year old mother for her social security check that would otherwise allow her to be financially independant. Doubly harmful when a very small percent, if any, actually goes to helping orphans and instead supports the continuation of the predetory practice.
• groestl 8y ago
  One real-world example is Coca Cola [0]. While most of the consumers probably don't care, influence of a small but committed minority made Coca Cola kosher, halal, and vegan. [0] https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/the-real-thing-how-coke-became-kosher https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/the-re...
  • johnday 8y ago
    I'm not sure veganism counts as a superstition.
    • ekianjo 8y ago
      I guess it depends on the point of view because there are several versions of veganism out there and not every single of them is as rational as the other. If veganism is concerned about not "eating any kind of animal product", then it's clearly fictitious once you consider the fact that animals such as insects/mites leave residues wherever they go, and in stuff like pure fruit juices there is always a chance of % of insect content because of the nature of production methods and infestation. Now, if it is defined it veganism as "reducing animal suffering", it makes more sense but then it makes less sense for them to be so strict from a dietary standpoint - for example they could allow themselves to eat eggs from free roaming chickens feeding themselves from herbs and insects they find if what matters most is the reduction of industrial exploitation of chickens in cages.
    • groestl 8y ago
      Let's just say conviction (in this case, it was also just a side effect).
    • saagarjha 8y ago
      There are many people who are vegans for religious reasons, just like other religious dietary restrictions.
  • chmod775 8y ago
    By my calculation just about half (maybe just 1/3rd) of the world population doesn't eat pork for various reasons, and Coca Cola is an international brand, so be careful who you call a minority. Of course I just added practitioners of religions that forbid the consumption of pork together and I'm aware some of those eat pork anyways (because they don't adhere to it too closely), but still: It will be a sizeable market.
• sv12l 8y ago
  Something similar happened recently with Subway in Singapore. They have stopped serving bacon to comes to terms with Halal certification in order to get more business from primarily Muslims.
  • base698 8y ago
    "Intransigent Minority" https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
• travisoneill1 8y ago
  Yeah the logic checks out, but is fighting it any better? In this case there are basically 2 options. Create a competing superstition that says black doors are good, or make laws requiring doors to be painted black. So now you either have 2 superstitions or something a whole lot worse than a superstition. In this case it's probably better to just live with not having black doors.
  • AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > Create a competing superstition that says black doors are good, or make laws requiring doors to be painted black. Or, you know, that the color of the door doesn't matter? I fail to see how that'll be a superstition.
    • ralusek 8y ago
      In modern political landscape, deciding that the door's color doesn't matter would be to deny its identity.
      • AsyncAwait 8y ago
        > In modern political landscape If that's a reference to the various gender pronouns and the like, regardless of what you think about it, it mostly strives for equal rights, not more rights as far as I know, so a more apt mapping may be that the doors should be approached in the same way regardless of what particular color they are today.
        • ralusek 8y ago
          It's not. It's a reference to the more recent philosophies regarding race that indicate that being "colorblind," i.e. not factoring the race of an individual into your decision-making process, is actually a form of racism, because you're denying the individual's historical and lived experiences.
    • travisoneill1 8y ago
      It isn't. And the point of the initial comment is that it loses out to a superstition.
• darkerside 8y ago
  It's not superstitious, it's a measure of caring. The superstitious in this case care very strongly about not having black doors, and they vote with their wallets. The other folks do not give a damn either way, and so shops stop painting doors black. Imagine a small subgroup decides they really, really love black doors. They will pay double price for a black door because they are so hard to find. Shop owner will satisfy that demand or lose that market to a competitor who's willing to step over that line. Capitalism is an elegant system for resource allocation, really. I wish more people understood it.
  • AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > Capitalism is an elegant system for resource allocation, really. I wish more people understood it. It heavily depends on who you are and the type of capitalism in question. The present implementation in many places seems less than elegant. For example CEO pay has been skyrocketing compared to worker wages precisely because as companies have more and more resources, they don't have a reasonable means to distribute them fairly, so they just dump the majority of the proceeds on the top management as a lazy hack.
    • darkerside 8y ago
      I know it's not perfect, but that really misses the forest for the trees. I for one agree we need to find a way to redistribute that wealth, but what exactly generated all of that ridiculous wealth on the first place? And people have access to more advanced goods and services than ever at unprecedentedly cheap prices. Again, I agree we need to lift up our lower class right now, but by many metrics, it's better to be impoverished today than to be middle class 50 years ago, and I think people forget that or don't want to admit it.
      • AsyncAwait 8y ago
        I am not saying capitalism as such is terrible, or that we should abolish it etc. What I do think we need is to have a more healthy mix of properly regulated capitalism, higher taxation of top earners, closing loopholes and corporations storing cash overseas and healthy social programs, infrastructure development etc. As for " it's better to be impoverished today than to be middle class 50 years ago", there was certainly less access to all kinds of goods, but there was much more job security as well, (you could work for a single company all your career), there was also more opportunity to own a house at a younger age and move higher up the ladder with lower education and less debt. What you also need to look at is things like student debt, 50 years ago, higher education was free at the point of use. Now, it puts you into dept at an enormously young age, before you even fully realize what it all means.
• aaaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Or eating halal: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-08/most-intolerant-wins-nassim-taleb-exposes-dictatorship-small-minority https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-08/most-intolerant-wi...
• C14L 8y ago
  True. But if you actively fight it, then your openness becomes the first casualty.
• avip 8y ago
  Articulate take on that here https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheis...
• rjf72 8y ago
  Something more relevant to contemporary society is that it also works with prudishness, but through a different effect. Rather than a loss of business there will be a loss of support for non-prudish behavior. As an example imagine video games that have characters in skimpy outfits. A tiny minority may complain about this. And it's often the case that this minority is not even actually a consumer of the products they're complaining about. But there will rarely be any meaningful voice against this minority going, "Wait.. no, I want my characters in skimpy outfits." Because to do so it makes you look like some sort of 'something' that's certainly undesirable. And so from the perspective a company that may not be particularly well attuned to its own userbase, it will see 100% of respondents on a given topic support censorship, 0% oppose it. That's not such a hard choice to make. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/video-game-sales-set-to-reverse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-25/video-gam...
• naasking 8y ago
  > This may appear controversial, but the fact is you can't fight superstition with openness because openness accepts superstition and lets it grow and conquer everything. The only way to combat superstition is to actively fight it. You're assuming an awful lot of human cognition that doesn't seem justified. Firstly, that superstition "grows". In fact, empirically, the opposite seems to be the case: people have become naturally less superstitious over time. We have more atheists now than ever. This trend was well established long before the New Atheists, so don't try to attribute it to them. Secondly, actively fighting any deeply held belief engenders feelings of oppression, causing in-group solidarity and out-group hostility to increase. When facts side with the out-group, then this lead to "alternative facts" and the erosion of social cohesion and compromise. Which is where we are now. "Fighting a culture war" with fellow citizens and leaving the population vulnerable to propaganda and destabilization efforts from foreign powers. Now that's dangerous.
  • bambax 8y ago
    I respectfully disagree. We are not less superstitious than our forebearers, at least not the ones we know something about, such as, for instance, members of the Enlightenment (including the Founding fathers of the US). When we say we are getting less and less superstitious we usually compare ourselves to some version of the "cavemen" we know absolutely nothing about, that we use as a straw-man. Secondly, "actively fighting deeply held beliefs" is probably the only way to go, because if we don't, then said beliefs simply win over. Black doors don't matter any which way, but there are things that matter. For example, anti-vax people should be convinced first, but if they can't be convinced, they need to be ostracized, because they threaten the existence of the group. They may resent it and be very upset about it, but that's a small price to pay for survival.
    • naasking 8y ago
      > Enlightenment (including the Founding fathers of the US). When we say we are getting less and less superstitious we usually compare ourselves to some version of the "cavemen" we know absolutely nothing about, that we use as a straw-man. So you think 23% Enlightment-era peasants were religiously unaffiliated, like 23% of Americans are now? Some European countries are even majority atheist. You're also claiming that these countries had exactly these demographics even 200 hundred years ago? > Secondly, "actively fighting deeply held beliefs" is probably the only way to go, because if we don't, then said beliefs simply win over. That's speculation for one, and two, "actively fighting" can mean many things, some of which are constructive, some of which are not.