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Eric Brown's avatar

Consider Nassim Taleb's Minority Rule - that a small but intransigent minority can dominate an entire population and have them submit to their preferences.

Nassim cites that 3-4% is enough, so the 6% of the population that is woke is certainly far above this threshold.

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Brian Chau's avatar

I completely agree. However, excluding specifically them from power will take less effort and organization than convincing them on a large scale.

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Brad & Butter's avatar

Three counter-bets against this idea:

1. Conversion will be easier than strong minority exclusion, but majority atomization will be easier than social change of the majority. It is inherently asymmetric, like Yarvin's entropy vs extropy.

2. There is inherent congruence between minority perception and the Penrose Square Root Law of voting power https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/why-do-people-overestimate-the-size

3. When applying the Tipping Point, the topology of the social network changes the percentage of the strong minority, in general less tight-knit cultures has slower information diffusion thus needing larger committed groups, and cliques requires KOLs (selective role priority in commitment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_point_(sociology)#Other_uses

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Eric Brown's avatar

While I agree that excluding them is easier than convincing them, it's still going to be extremely difficult.

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Brian Chau's avatar

Not really, the ideas of wokeness are not only delusional but also contrary to almost every human impulse, which is not something that can be said about trumpism, socialism, or most ideologies. It's a unique ad-hoc ideology whose primary purpose is to make up an excuse for why everything liberal inheritors have tried has failed. Anyways I should stop myself before I spoil more future material.

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BKGVR's avatar

What happens when you have multiple intransigent minorities? I think Taleb's rule only works if the entire rest of the country is apathetic or disorganized.

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Torin McCabe's avatar

"Yes, and..." is a decent persuasion strategy. Rather than trying to get someone to consider or change their base assumptions or to try and disprove some parts of what they believe. Instead you say "yes, I agree with most of what you're saying *AND* what *WE* also need to consider is..."

With Trump his rhetoric is good *AND* we also need to have real policy changes like we see DeSantis doing in FL.

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ᴛʀᴀᴄᴇ ᴊᴏʜᴀɴɴᴇꜱᴇɴ's avatar

Torin, I could not agree more. I use “yes and” all the time.

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