N.N. Taleb "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"
Via his Medium site, August 14, 2016:
(Chapter from Skin in the Game)
How
Europe will eat Halal — Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking
section — Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king –How to
prevent a friend from working too hard –Omar Sharif ‘s conversion — How
to make a market collapse
The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a
complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an
intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to
reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total
population, for the entire population to have to submit to their
preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of
the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the
choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd,
it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that
(fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they
don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex
systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).
The
main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way
not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the
nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never
(one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an
idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand
an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of
ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole
differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And
interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this
chapter is the minority rule.
The
minority rule will show us how it all it takes is a small number of
intolerant virtuous people with skin in the game, in the form of
courage, for society to function properly.
This
example of complexity hit me, ironically, as I was attending the New
England Complex Systems institute summer barbecue. As the hosts were
setting up the table and unpacking the drinks, a friend who was
observant and only ate Kosher dropped by to say hello. I offered him a
glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people
sometimes call lemonade, almost certain that he would reject it owing to
his dietary laws. He didn’t. He drank the liquid called lemonade, and
another Kosher person commented: “liquids around here are Kosher”. We
looked at the carton container. There was a fine print: a tiny symbol, a
U inside a circle, indicating that it was Kosher.
The symbol will be detected by those who need to know and look for the
minuscule print. As to others, like myself, I had been speaking prose
all these years without knowing, drinking Kosher liquids without knowing
they were Kosher liquids.
Figure 1 The lemonade container with the circled U indicating it is (literally) Kosher.
Criminals With Peanut Allergies
A
strange idea hit me. The Kosher population represents less than three
tenth of a percent of the residents of the United States. Yet, it
appears that almost all drinks are Kosher. Why? Simply because going
full Kosher allows the producer, grocer, restaurant, to not have to
distinguish between Kosher and nonkosher for liquids, with special
markers, separate aisles, separate inventories, different stocking
sub-facilities. And the simple rule that changes the total is as
follows:
A Kosher (or halal) eater will never eat nonkosher (or nonhalal) food , but a nonkosher eater isn’t banned from eating kosher.
Or, rephrased in another domain:
A disabled person will not use the regular bathroom but a nondisabled person will use the bathroom for disabled people.
Granted,
sometimes, in practice, we hesitate to use the bathroom with the
disabled sign on it owing to some confusion –mistaking the rule for the
one for parking cars, under the belief that the bathroom is reserved for
exclusive use by the handicapped.
Someone
with a peanut allergy will not eat products that touch peanuts but a
person without such allergy can eat items without peanut traces in them.
Which
explains why it is so hard to find peanuts on airplanes and why schools
are peanut-free (which, in a way, increases the number of persons with
peanut allergies as reduced exposure is one of the causes behind such
allergies).
Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:
An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts.
Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And the rule is an asymmetry in choices.
I
once pulled a prank on a friend. Years ago when Big Tobacco were hiding
and repressing the evidence of harm from secondary smoking, New York
had smoking and nonsmoking sections in restaurants (even airplanes had,
absurdly, a smoking section). I once went to lunch with a friend
visiting from Europe: the restaurant only had availability in the
smoking sections. I convinced the friend that we needed to buy
cigarettes as we had to smoke in the smoking section. He complied.
Two
more things. First, the geography of the terrain, that is, the spatial
structure, matters a bit; it makes a big difference whether the
intransigents are in their own district or are mixed with the rest of
the population. If the people following the minority rule lived in
Ghettos, with their separate small economy, then the minority rule would
not apply. But, when a population has an even spatial distribution, say
the ratio of such a minority in a neighborhood is the same as that in
the village, that in the village is the same as in the county, that in
the county is the same as that in state, and that in the sate is the
same as nationwide, then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to
the minority rule. Second, the cost structure matters quite a bit. It
happens in our first example that making lemonade compliant with Kosher
laws doesn’t change the price by much, not enough to justify
inventories. But if the manufacturing of Kosher lemonade cost
substantially more, then the rule will be weakened in some nonlinear
proportion to the difference in costs. If it cost ten times as much to
make Kosher food, then the minority rule will not apply, except perhaps
in some very rich neighborhoods......
