{"id":35847,"date":"2018-07-09T07:03:53","date_gmt":"2018-07-09T12:03:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35847"},"modified":"2018-07-09T07:03:53","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T12:03:53","slug":"the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35847","title":{"rendered":"The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small\u00a0Minority"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 id=\"d4ce\" class=\"graf graf--h3 graf--leading graf--title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/incerto\/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15\">The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small\u00a0Minority<\/a><\/h3>\n<p id=\"92e2\" class=\"graf graf--p graf-after--h3\">(Chapter from <em class=\"markup--em markup--p-em\">Skin in the Game<\/em>)<\/p>\n<p id=\"a6a5\" class=\"graf graf--p graf-after--p\"><em class=\"markup--em markup--p-em\">How Europe will eat Halal\u200a\u2014\u200aWhy you don\u2019t have to smoke in the smoking section\u200a\u2014\u200aYour food choices on the fall of the Saudi king \u2013How to prevent a friend from working too hard \u2013Omar Sharif \u2018s conversion\u200a\u2014\u200aHow to make a market collapse<\/em><\/p>\n<p id=\"1890\" class=\"graf graf--p graf--hasDropCapModel graf--hasDropCap graf-after--p\"><span class=\"graf-dropCap\">T<\/span>he 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 \u2013a certain type of intransigent minorities \u2013to 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\u2019t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don\u2019t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers\u2019 wisdom).<\/p>\n<p id=\"eb55\" class=\"graf graf--p graf-after--p\">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 <em class=\"markup--em markup--p-em\">never<\/em> (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 \u201cemergent\u201d property of the whole, by which <em class=\"markup--em markup--p-em\">parts<\/em> and <em class=\"markup--em markup--p-em\">whole<\/em> 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 <em class=\"markup--em markup--p-em\">minority<\/em> rule.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small\u00a0Minority (Chapter from Skin in the Game) How Europe will eat Halal\u200a\u2014\u200aWhy you don\u2019t have to smoke in the smoking section\u200a\u2014\u200aYour food choices on the fall of the Saudi king \u2013How to prevent a friend from working too hard \u2013Omar Sharif \u2018s conversion\u200a\u2014\u200aHow to make a market [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[153,154,14273,19107,15196],"class_list":["post-35847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-complex-systems","tag-complexity","tag-medium","tag-nassim-nicholas-taleb","tag-skin-in-the-game"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35848,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35847\/revisions\/35848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}