6 ms·
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority (2015)
- dustinmoris 7y agoThe 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 7y agoI 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.
- mieseratte 7y ago> 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/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- dustinmoris 7y ago> 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 7y ago>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 7y agoOr Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell. Or almost anything by Orwell; his crankiness knows no limits.
- huffmsa 7y agoSeinfeld 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.
- amelius 7y agoBlack Swan was just a simple analogy that the author decided to write an entire book about.
- wsxcde 7y agoHe 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.
- thermonot 7y agoThen definately check his twitter, he is quite a figure: https://twitter.com/nntaleb https://twitter.com/nntaleb
- icebraining 7y agoI recommend his interviews on Econtalk: https://www.econlib.org/econtalk-by-featured-guest-and-letter/?selected_letter=T#NassimNicholasTaleb 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.
- Dowwie 7y ago@dang article is from 2016
- cousin_it 7y agoI 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 7y agoIts 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- makomk 7y ago2 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 7y agoMaybe 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.
- reshie 7y agoor 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.
- flixic 7y agoSeems 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)
- odiroot 7y ago> 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 7y agoHe'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 7y agoParticles don't spread easily, the air is filtered aggressively.
- glastra 7y agoI 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 7y agoThought the same. It needs a good editor to take things out, his thoughts on lemonade aren't really necessary.
- amelius 7y agoLinux users are a minority, still we don't have a practically usable Linux on mobile phones.
- luckylion 7y agoMost Linux users are fine using any mobile OS, but most normal users won't use a non-polished linux.
- bananatron 7y agoThe premise of this article might reason that Linux users (as the niche) can/will use non-linux systems, but the reverse is not true.
- em-bee 7y agobecause those who won't use non-free systems haven't reached those magic 3% yet.
- dagw 7y agoHow 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.
- drieddust 7y agoAre they intolerant as well? Just being minority doesn't cut it.
- amelius 7y agoPerhaps the "minority" part doesn't matter, and it's just the (in)tolerance that matters.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoIt'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.
- wsxcde 7y agoIf 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.)
- eloisius 7y agoNot eating meat (as a non-vegetarian) cost more than eating halal meat as a non-Muslim or drinking kosher juice as a gentile does.
- pharke 7y agoThat 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 7y agoHis 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.
- abiro 7y agoI 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/
- hos234 7y agoSomeone 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.
- abiro 7y agoHe 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.)
- dagw 7y agoSomeone 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 7y ago
- nwatson 7y ago>> (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.
- notacoward 7y agoSince 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.
- drtillberg 7y agoThe 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.
- robteix 7y agoIt 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.
- cJ0th 7y agoAfter 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.