Some notes on Taleb's 'The dominance of the stubborn minority'

 In a draft of his chapter 'The dominance of the stubborn minority' Taleb presents a model of how minorities with some restrictive habit can end up by changing the behavior of the majority. As one of his illustrations goes, imagine a daughter who starts eating only organic food. As organic food taste the same and costs roughly the same it is likely that the parents will start buying organic food for all of them out of simplicity. If a few families in an area start doing the same, the rule will apply to the stores. They will also start selling only organic food to get a simpler logistic. And thus the rule will multiply until the restriction of the minority becomes the rule and not the exception. The rule and the chapter are very perspicuous and made me think of a few things I would like to add to the discussion.

Edit: First of all, I should note that this is not the dominance of the 'minority', but the dominance of the 'more restricted' behavior. This is so because what pushes the change is not the number of participants (minorities or majorities), but their restrictions. Yet, this labeling mistake can be explained by the fact that being a minority is a condition for the pattern to be interesting. No one would see nothing paradoxical about the behavior of a majority be the dominant one. Nevertheless, the mislabeling can be misleading if one looses sight that the power of the system lies in the restriction and not in the number of adherents. 

Point one – flexibility

It seems that the minority must be stubborn and yet flexible (or adaptive) for its behavior to succeed. What I mean is that for the stubborn's behavior to prevail the minority must be around and, to a certain extent, be mixed within the majority they want to change. Think about the daughter eating only organic food. If she despises her parents diet so much that she stops eating with them (or even quit living with them) and go eat (live) with like minded people, she will not change any behavior. This first point is not extraneous to the text, but it may be worth being more explicit about it. It is implicitly made in the example of the Muslim marriage conversion versus the inflexibility of the Gnostic faiths. In allowing inter-religion marriage with the condition of conversion the Muslims have found a way to mix with people from other religions living around without relaxing the commitment to their beliefs. Maybe what we need to describe such a phenomenon is some sort of an anti-fragile stubbornness. Your behavior will benefit and grow to unintended levels if you stick with it where it is not the common rule. In other words it will benefit from an initially hostile (or indifferent) environment.

Point two – not too pushy

Now let me extrapolate a little further. It is just an intuition, but it can be backed up by some data on polarization of political discourse in recent times (cf. Haidt) and a few historical examples. I believe that a minority would not benefit too much of a peremptory pushing of its restrictions. If they push their behavior too much tensions will arise and the opposing side is likely to become over defensive and attached to their until then unreflected behavior. Recycling the first example of the chapter, if you pass a law obliging all sweet beverages to be kosher I suspect people would explicitly oppose to it. One can think of Antiochus obliging Eleazer to chose between eating pig or the capital punishment and the Jew choosing to die. This seems to be the case even if you have an army to force your restrictions. One can think about Franco unsuccessfully forbidding Catalans to speak Catalan while English manages to sneak into the vocabulary of every modern western language without too much ado. If this is true, or at least likely, we seem to enter the field of ideology which is in fact important to think about human behavior. I use ideology here in an unloaded sense meaning that people usually attach some special meaning to interpret and justify their behaviors.

Point three - The paradox

If we accept the hypothesis that ideology is a requirement for minorities to stick to their restrictions (point two), but also accept that for the restrictions to became the rule and not the exception they must spread to people without the ideology (point one) we have a paradox. It is a case for a non-ideological spread of an ideologically motivated behavior. It seems paradoxical, but fortunately reality deals a lot better with paradoxes than reason. The personal case of my family looks a lot like the example of the family used to illustrate the chapter, but, unsurprisingly, with the features I felt worth mentioning above. I became a vegetarian due to ethical reasons. At first, the family meals didn't have to change, I would eat the menu just skipping the meat. With some time my mom worried that I wasn't eating enough protein and started to cook more elaborated vegetarian dishes. I remember she stating that everybody in the family started to eat healthier because the salads now were more than lettuce and tomatoes. Some time after that my father became vegetarian, mostly for health reasons. Thus two thirds of the family, for different reasons, were following the restricted diet. My mom still eats meat, probably as a counter reaction to my dad being to pushy about how meat is disgustingly unhealthy. Even though, ought of simplicity in most of the meals there are only vegetarian options.

Conclusion

A weakness of the model presented in the chapter is that it just works if you are substituting things which feel and cost mostly the same. People only accept to eat organic with the minority because they don't have to give anything up. They still have the same food and pay roughly the same price. But what about as in most relevant cases when the change implies biggest changes? Say, if the change is not between organic or GMO but between eating meat or not. Those who eat meat also eat meatless meals and those who are vegetarians do not. Would the model work? By the description of the chapter it seems that the answer is negative. People are not ready to make strong changes of behavior just because is simpler. After the suggested additions above maybe the addition of some reason (in fact various reasons) and persistence without being too pushy can make it happen.