Aug 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 flexibleone. 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.
Muslims have Kosher laws so to speak, but these
are much narrower and apply only to meat. For Muslim and Jews have near-identical
slaughter rules (all Kosher is halal for most Sunni Muslims, or was so in past
centuries, but the reverse is not true). Note that these slaughter rules are
skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean
[discussed in Chapter] Greek and Semitic practice to only worship the gods if
one has skin in the game, sacrifice meat to the divinity, and eat what’s left.
The Gods do not like cheap signaling.
Now consider this manifestation of the
dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim
population is only three to four percent, a very high number of the meat we
find is halal. Close to seventy percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are
halal. Close to ten percent of the chain Subway carry halal-only stores
(meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs from the loss of business of
nonpork stores. The same holds in South Africa where, with the same proportion
of Muslims, a disproportionately higher number of chicken is Halal certified.
But in the U.K. and other Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to
reach a high level, as people may rebel against forceful abidance to other’s
religious norms. For instance, the 7th Century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal
made a point to never eat halal meat, in his famous defiant poem boasting his
Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”. (Al-Akhtal was reflecting the
standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier — Christians were tortured in pagan times by being
forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian
martyrs starved to death.)
One can expect the same rejection of religious
norms to take place in the West as the Muslim populations in Europe grows.
Figure 2
Renormalization group: steps one through three (start from the top): Four boxes
containing four boxes, with one of the boxes pink at step one, with successive
applications of the minority rule.
So the minority rule may produce a larger share of
halal food in the stores than warranted by the proportion of halal eaters in
the population, but with a headwind somewhere because some people may have a
taboo against Moslem food. But with some non-religious Kashrut rules, so to speak,
the share can be expected converge to closer to a hundred percent (or some high
number). In the U.S. and Europe, “organic” food companies are selling more and
more products precisely because of the minority rule and because ordinary and
unlabeled food may be seen by some to contain pesticides, herbicides, and
transgenic genetically modified organisms, “GMOs” with, according to them,
unknown risks. (What we call GMOs in this context means transgenic food,
entailing the transfer of genes from a foreign organism or species). Or it
could be for some existential reasons, cautious behavior, or Burkean conservatism
–some may not want to venture too far too fast from what their grandparents
ate. Labeling something “organic” is a way to say that it contains no transgenic
GMOs.
In promoting genetically modified food via all
manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda
(with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly), the big
agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the
majority. No, you idiots. As I said, your snap “scientific” judgment is too
naive in these type of decisions. Consider that transgenic-GMO eaters will eat
nonGMOs, but not the reverse. So it may suffice to have a tiny, say no more
than five percent of evenly spatially distributed population of non-genetically
modified eaters for the entire population to have to eat
non-GMO food. How? Say you have a corporate event, a wedding, or a lavish party
to celebrate the fall of the Saudi Arabian regime, the bankruptcy of the
rent-seeking investment bank Goldman Sachs, or the public reviling of Ray
Kotcher, chairman of Ketchum the public relation firm that smears scientists
and scientific whistleblowers on behalf of big corporations. Do you need to
send a questionnaire asking people if they eat or don’t eat transgenic GMOs and
reserve special meals accordingly? No. You just select everything non-GMO,
provided the price difference is not consequential. And the price difference
appears to be small enough to be negligible as (perishable) food costs in
America are largely, about up to eighty or ninety percent, determined by
distribution and storage, not the cost at the agricultural level. And as
organic food (and designations such as “natural”) is in higher demand, from the
minority rule, distribution costs decrease and the minority rule ends up
accelerating in its effect.
Big Ag (the large agricultural firms) did not
realize that this is the equivalent of entering a game in which one needed to not
just win more points than the adversary, but win ninety-seven percent of the
total points just to be safe. It is strange, once again, to see Big Ag who
spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research cum smear campaigns, with
hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than
the rest of the population, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric
choices.
Another example: do not think that the spread of
automatic shifting cars is necessarily due to the majority of drivers initially
preferring automatic; it can just be because those who can drive manual shifts
can always drive automatic, but the reciprocal is not true [1].
The method of analysis employed here is called
renormalization group, a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows
us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next –without
mathematics.
Renormalization
Group
Figure 2 shows four boxes exhibiting what is
called fractal self-similarity. Each box contains four smaller boxes. Each one
of the four boxes will contain four boxes, and so all the way down, and all the
way up until we reach a certain level. There are two colors: yellow for the
majority choice, and pink for the minority one.
Assume the smaller unit contains four people, a
family of four. One of them is in the intransigent minority and eats only
nonGMO food (which includes organic). The color of the box is pink and the
others yellow . We “renormalize once” as we move up: the stubborn daughter
manages to impose her rule on the four and the unit is now all pink, i.e. will
opt for nonGMO. Now, step three, you have the family going to a barbecue party
attended by three other families. As they are known to only eat nonGMO, the
guests will cook only organic. The local grocery store realizing the
neighborhood is only nonGMO switches to nonGMO to simplify life, which impacts
the local wholesaler, and the stories continues and “renormalizes”.
By some coincidence, the day before the Boston
barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of a friend
I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engage in an activity that when
abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss
of definition in the facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened
to be visiting and chose the friend’s office to kill time. Galam was first to
apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political science;
his name was familiar as he is the author of the main book on the subject,
which had then been sitting for months in an unopened Amazon box in my
basement. He introduced me to his research and showed me a computer model of
elections by which it suffices that some minority exceeds a certain level for
its choices to prevail.
So the same illusion exists in political
discussions, spread by the political “scientists”: you think that because some
extreme right or left wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the
population that their candidate would get ten percent of the votes. No: these
baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for
their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote
for that extreme faction, just as nonKosher people can eat Kosher, and these
people are the ones to watch out for as they may swell the numbers of votes for
the extreme party. Galam’s models produced a bevy of counterintuitive effects
in political science –and his predictions turned out to be way closer to real
outcomes than the naive consensus.
The Veto
The fact we saw from the renormalization group the
“veto” effect as a person in a group can steer choices. Rory Sutherland
suggested that this explains why some fast-food chains, such as McDonald
thrive, not because they offer a great product, but because they are not vetoed
in a certain socio-economic group –and by a small proportions of people in that
group at that. To put it in technical terms, it was a best worse-case
divergence from expectations: a lower variance and lower mean.
When there are few choices, McDonald’s appears to
be a safe bet. It is also a safe bet in shady places with few regulars where
the food variance from expectation can be consequential –I am writing these
lines in Milan’s cental train station and as offensive as it can be to a
visitor from far away, McDonald’s is one of the few restaurants there.
Shockingly, one sees Italians there seeking refuge from a risky meal.
Pizza is the same story: it is commonly accepted
food and outside a fancy party nobody will be blamed for ordering it.
Rory wrote to me about the asymmetry beer-wine and
the choices made for parties: “Once you have ten percent or more women at a
party, you cannot serve only beer. But most men will drink wine. So you only
need one set of glasses if you serve only wine — the universal donor, to use the language of blood
groups.”
This strategy of the best lower bound might have
been played by the Khazars looking to chose between Islam, Judaism, and
Christianity. Legend has it that three high ranking delegations (bishops,
rabbis and sheikhs) came to make the sales pitch. They asked the Christians: if
you were forced to chose between Judaism and Islam, which one would you pick?
Judaism, they replied. Then they asked the Muslim: which of the two,
Christianity or Judaism. Judaism, the Muslim said. Judaim it was and the tribe
converted.
Lingua
Franca
If a meeting is taking place in Germany in the
Teutonic-looking conference room of a corporation that is sufficiently
international or European, and one of the persons in the room doesn’t speak
German, the entire meeting will be run in… English, the brand of inelegant
English used in corporations across the world. That way they can equally offend
their Teuronic ancestors and the English language[2]. It all started with the asymmetric rule that
those who are nonnative in English know (bad) English, but the reverse (English
speakers knowing other languages) is less likely. French was supposed to be the
language of diplomacy as civil servants coming from aristocratic background
used it –while their more vulgar compatriots involved in commerce relied on
English. In the rivalry between the two languages, English won as commerce grew
to dominate modern life; the victory it has nothing to do with the prestige of
France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less
beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically
confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters.
We can thus get some intuition on how the
emergence of lingua francalanguages can come from minority rules–and that
is a point that is not visible to linguists. Aramaic is a Semitic language
which succeeded Canaanite (that is, Phoenician-Hebrew) in the Levant and
resembles Arabic; it was the language Jesus Christ spoke. The reason it came to
dominate the Levant and Egypt isn’t because of any particular imperial Semitic
power or the fact that they have interesting noses. It was the Persians –who
speak an Indo-European language –who spread Aramaic, the language of Assyria,
Syria, and Babylon. Persians taught Egyptians a language that was not their
own. Simply, when the Persians invaded Babylon they found an administration
with scribes who could only use Aramaic and didn’t know Persian, so Aramaic
became the state language. If your secretary can only take dictation in
Aramaic, Aramaic is what you will use. This led to the oddity of Aramaic being
used in Mongolia, as records were maintained in the Syriac alphabet (Syriac is
the Eastern dialect of Aramaic). And centuries later, the story would repeat
itself in reverse, with the Arabs using Greek in their early administration in
the seventh and eighth’s centuries. For during the Hellenistic era, Greek
replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in the Levant, and
the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek. But it was not the
Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean –Alexander (himself not Greek
but Macedonian and spoke Greek as second language, don’t discuss this with a
Greek as it infuriates them) did not lead to an immediate deep cultural
Hellenization. It was the Romans who accelerated the spreading of Greek, as
they used it in their administration across the Eastern empire.
A French Canadian friend from Montreal, Jean-Louis
Rheault, commented as follows, bemoaning the loss of language of French
Canadians outside narrowly provincial areas. He said: “In Canada, when we say bilingual,
it is English speaking and when we say “French speaking” it becomes bilingual.”
The One-Way
Street of Religions
In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the
Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be
attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t
particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with
tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of
the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who
survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being
Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.
The two asymmetric rules were are as follows.
First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he
needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens
to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim[3]. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as
apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death
penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub,
was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous
Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later
divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.
Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do
simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian
(Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny
minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one
can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the
religion has opposite rules: the mother is required to be Jewish, causing
interfaith marriages to leave the community. An even stronger asymmetry than
that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic
faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans (Gnostic religions are those
with mysteries and knowledgethat is typically accessible
to only a minority of elders, with the rest of the members in the dark about
the details of the faith). Unlike Islam that requires either parents to be
Muslim, and Judaism that asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these
three religions require both parents to be of the faith,
otherwise the person says toodaloo to the community.
Egypt has a flat terrain. The distribution of the
population presents homogeneous mixtures there, which permits renormalization
(i.e. allows the asymmetric rule to prevail) –we saw earlier in the chapter
that for Kosher rules to work, one needed Jews to be somewhat spread out across
the country. But in places such as Lebanon, Galilee, and Northern Syria, with
mountainous terrain, Christians and other Non Sunni Muslims remained
concentrated. Christians not being exposed to Muslims, experienced no
intermarriage.
Egypt’s Copts suffered from another problem: the
irreversibility of Islamic conversions. Many Copts during Islamic rule
converted to Islam when it was merely an administrative procedure, something
that helps one land a job or handle a problem that requires Islamic
jurisprudence. One do not have to really believe in it since Islam doesn’t conflict
markedly with Orthodox Christianity. Little by little a Christian or Jewish
family bearing the marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a
couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their
ancestors.
So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity,
which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For, before Islam, the
original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire can be largely seen due to…
the blinding intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and
proselyting recalcitrance. Roman pagans were initially tolerant of Christians,
as the tradition was to share gods with other members of the empire. But they
wondered why these Nazarenes didn’t want to give and take gods and offer that
Jesus fellow to the Roman pantheon in exchange for some other gods. What, our
gods aren’t good enough for them? But Christians were intolerant of Roman
paganism. The “persecutions” of the Christians had vastly more to do with the
intolerance of the Christians for the pantheon and local gods, than the
reverse. What we read is history written by the Christian side, not the
Greco-Roman one. [4]
We know too little about the Roman side during the
rise of Christianity, as hagiographies have dominated the discourse: we have
for instance the narrative of the martyr Saint Catherine, who kept converting
her jailors until she was beheaded, except that… she may have never existed.
There are endless histories of Christian martyrs and saints –but very little
about the other side, Pagan heroes. All we have is the bit we know about the
reversion to Christianity during the emperor Julian’s apostasy and the writings
of his entourage of Syrian-Greek pagans such as Libanius Antiochus. Julian had
tried to go back to Ancient Paganism in vain: it was like trying to keep a
balloon under water. And it was not because the majority was pagan as
historians mistakenly think: it was because the Christian side was too
unyielding. Christianity had great minds such as Gregorius of Nazianzen and
Basil of Caesaria, but nothing to match the great orator Libanius, not even
close. (My heuristic is that the more pagan, the more brilliant one’s mind, and
the higher one’s ability to handle nuances and ambiguity. Purely monotheistic
religious such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist
atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity.)
In fact we can observe in the history of
Mediterranean “religions” or, rather, rituals and systems of behavior and
belief, a drift dictated by the intolerant, actually bringing the system closer
to what we can call a religion. Judaism might have almost lost because of the
mother-rule and the confinement to a tribal base, but Christianity ruled, and
for the very same reasons, Islam did. Islam? there have been many Islams,
the final accretion quite different from the earlier ones. For Islam itself is
ending up being taken over (in the Sunni branch) by the purists simply because
these were more intolerant than the rest: the Wahhabis, founders of Saudi
Arabia, were the ones who destroyed the shrines, and to impose the maximally intolerant
rule, in a manner that was later imitated by “ISIS” (the Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria/the Levant). Every single accretion of Sunni Islam seems to be there
to accommodate the most intolerant of its branches.
Imposing
Virtue on Others
This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a
few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they
offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or
don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes,
that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books,
or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician
Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a
letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter
in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas. [5]
The same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least
the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia
stories.
Let us conjecture that the
formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the
consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others
precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
An insight as to how the mechanisms of religion
and transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary
laws –and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced
by a minority. We saw earlier in the chapter the asymmetry between obeying and
breaking rules: a law-abiding (or rule abiding) fellow always follows the
rules, but a felon or someone with looser sets of principles will not always break
the rules. Likewise we discussed the strong asymmetric effects of the halaldietary
laws. Let us merge the two. It turns out that, in classical Arabic, the term halal has
one opposite: haram. Violating legal and moral rules
–any rule — is called haram. It is the exact same interdict that governs food
intake and all other human behaviors, like sleeping with the wife
of the neighbor, lending with interest (without partaking of downside of the
borrower) or killing one’s landlord for pleasure. Haram is haram and
is asymmetric.
From that we can see that once a moral rule is
established, it would suffice to have a small intransigent minority of
geographically distributed followers to dictate the norm in society. The sad
news, as we will see in the next chapter, is that one person looking at mankind
as an aggregate may mistakenly believe that humans are spontaneously becoming
more moral, better, more gentle, have better breath, when it applies to only a
small proportion of mankind.
The Stability of the Minority Rule, A
Probabilistic Argument
A probabilistic argument in favor of the minority
rule dictating societal values is as follows. Wherever you look across societies
and histories, you tend to find the same general moral laws prevailing, with
some, but not significant, variations: do not steal (at least not from
within the tribe); do not hunt orphans for pleasure; do not
gratuitously beat up passers by for training, use instead a boxing bags (unless
you are Spartan and even then you can only kill a limited number of helots for
training purposes), and similar interdicts. And we can see these rules
evolving over time to become more universal, expanding to a broader set, to
progressively include slaves, other tribes, other species (animals,
economists), etc. And one property of these laws: they are black-and-white,
binary, discrete, and allow no shadow. You cannot steal “a little bit” or
murder “moderately”. You cannot keep Kosher and eat “just a little bit” of pork
on Sunday barbecues.
Now it would be vastly more likely that these
values emerged from a minority that the majority. Why? Take the following two
theses:
Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority
rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule
is more likely to be emerge independently across populations.
What emerges from the minority rule is more likely
to be be black-and-white.
An example. Consider that an evil person wants to poison
the collective by putting some product into soda cans. He has two options. The
first is cyanide, which obeys a minority rule: a drop of poison (higher than a
small threshold) makes the entire liquid poisonous. The second is a
“majority”-style poison; it requires more than half the liquid to be poisonous in
order to kill. Now look at the inverse problem, a collection of dead people
after a dinner party, and you need to investigate the cause. The local Sherlock
Holmes would assert that conditional on the outcome that all people
drinking the soda having been killed, the evil man opted for the
first not the second option. Simply, the majority rule leads to fluctuations
around the average, with a high rate of survival.
The black-and-white character of these societal
laws can be explained with the following. Assume that under a certain regime,
when you mix white and dark blue in various combinations, you don’t get
variations of light blue, but dark blue. Such a regime is vastly more likely to
produce dark blue than another rule that allows more shades of blue.
Popper’s Paradox
Popper’s Paradox
I was at a large multi-table dinner party, the
kind of situation where you have to choose between the vegetarian risotto and
the non-vegetarian option when I noticed that my neighbor had his food catered
(including silverware) on a tray reminiscent of airplane fare. The dishes were
sealed with aluminum foil. He was evidently ultra-Kosher. It did not bother him
to be seated with prosciutto eaters who, in addition, mix butter and meat in the
same dishes. He just wanted to be left alone to follow his own preferences.
For Jews and Muslim minorities such as Shiites,
Sufis, and associated religions such as Druze and Alawis, the aim is for people
to leave them alone so they can satisfy their own dietary preferences –largely,
with historical exceptions here and there. But had my neighbor been a Sunni
Salafi, he would have required the entire room to be eating Halal. Perhaps the
entire building. Perhaps the entire town. Hopefully the entire country.
Hopefully the entire planet. Indeed, given the total lack of separation between
church and state, and between the holy and the profane (Chapter x), to him
Haram (the opposite of Halal) means literally illegal. The entire room was
committing a legal violation.
As I am writing these lines, people are disputing whether
the freedom of the enlightened West can be undermined by the intrusive policies
that would be needed to fight fundamentalists.As I am writing these lines,
people are disputing whether the freedom of the enlightened West can be
undermined by the intrusive policies that would be needed to fight Salafi
fundamentalists.
Clearly can democracy –by definition the majority — tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “
Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has
in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further,
“Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about
intolerance?”
This is in fact the incoherence that Kurt Gödel
(the grandmaster of logical rigor) detected in the constitution while taking
the naturalization exam. Legend has it that Gödel started arguing with the
judge and Einstein, who was his witness during the process, saved him.
I wrote about people with logical flaws asking me
if one should be “skeptical about skepticism”; I used a similar answer as
Popper when was asked if “ one could falsify falsification”.
We can answer these points using the minority
rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually,
as we saw, it willeventually destroy our world.
So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant
minorities. It is not permissible to use “American values” or “Western
principles” in treating intolerant Salafism (which denies other peoples’ right
to have their own religion). The West is currently in the process of committing
suicide.
The
Irreverence of Markets and Science
Now consider markets. We can say that markets
aren’t the sum of market participants, but price changes reflect the activities
of the most motivatedbuyer and seller. Yes, the most motivated rules.
Indeed this is something that only traders seem to understand: why a price can
drop by ten percent because of a single seller. All you need is a stubborn seller.
Markets react in a way that is disproportional to the impetus. The overall
stock markets represent currently more than thirty trillions dollars but a
single order in 2008, only fifty billion, that is less than two tenth of a
percent of the total, caused them to drop by close to ten percent, causing
losses of around three trillion. It was an order activated by the Parisian Bank
Société Générale who discovered a hidden acquisition by a rogue trader and
wanted to reverse the purchase. Why did the market react so disproportionately?
Because the order was one-way –stubborn — there was desire to sell but no way to change one’s mind. My personal adage is:
The market is like a large movie theatre with a
small door.
And the best way to detect a sucker (say the usual
finance journalist) is to see if his focus is on the size of the door or on
that of the theater. Stampedes happen in cinemas, say when someone shouts
“fire”, because those who want to be out do not want to stay in, exactly the
same unconditionality we saw with Kosher observance.
Science acts similarly. We will
return later with a discussion of how the minority rule is behind Karl Popper’s
approach to science. But let us for now discuss the more entertaining
Feynman. What do You Care What Other People Think? is the title
of a book of anecdotes by the great Richard Feynman, the most irreverent and
playful scientist of his day. As reflected in the title of the book, Feynman
conveys in it the idea of the fundamental irreverence of science, acting through
a similar mechanism as the Kosher asymmetry. How? Science isn’t the sum of what
scientists think, but exactly as with markets, a procedure that is highly
skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong (that is how science
operates but let’s ignore disciplines such as economics and political science
that are more like pompous entertainment). Had science operated by majority
consensus we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages and Einstein would have
ended as he started, a patent clerk with fruitless side hobbies.
***
Alexander said that it was preferable to have an
army of sheep led by a lion to an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or
no doubt he who produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value
of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome
for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two
battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time. He
was inspired by a version of this maxim. At the battle of Cannae, he remarked
to Gisco who complained that the Carthaginians were outnumbered by the Romans:
“There is one thing that’s more wonderful than their numbers … in all that
vast number there is not one man called Gisgo.[6]”[i]
Unus sed leo: only one but a lion.
This large payoff from stubborn courage is not
just in the military. The entire growth of society, whether economic or moral,
comes from a small number of people. So we close this chapter with a remark
about the role of skin in the game in the condition of society. Society doesn’t
evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meeting, academic
conferences, and polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move
the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere. And asymmetry is
present in about everything.
Notes
[1] Thank Amir-Reza Amini.
[2] Thank Arnie Schwarzvogel.
[3] Note some minor variations across regions
and Islamic sects. The original rule is that if a Muslim woman marries a Non
Muslim man, he needs to convert. In practice, in many countries, both need to
do so.
[4] The various modes of worship, which prevailed in
the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the
philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And
thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.
Gibbon
[5] “Never doubt that a small group of
thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that
ever has.” — Margaret Mead
[6] The Carthaginians seem to be short in name
variety: there are plenty of Hamilcars and Hadsrupals confusing historians.
Likewise there appear to be many Giscos, including the character in
Flaubert’s Salambo.
[i] https://books.google.com/books?id=VzMGAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA269&lpg=PA269&dq=gisco+battle+of+cannae&source=bl&ots=2ybmCD6EaT&sig=lqU71NF46YOpnOSXDfZUsQco2O0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAmoVChMI7vnU8-2tyAIVRjw-Ch3DhQkM#v=onepage&q=gisco%20battle%20of%20cannae&f=false
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