My biggest problem with this Taleb piece is that it doesn't really take into account the probability of success from a particular intolerant minority. In practice there's a kind of signal-strength effect where the further up the chain you go the less effective any one person becomes. (At least for the extended GMO example.) Once you factor that into the model Taleb's argument falls apart.
eg. Let's say a given family has a 25% chance of their intolerant child swaying food preferences. (This is very generous, because I'm fairly sure in practice it's under 5%.)
And we'll assume that going up the chain you need at least a 25% threshold to accomplish anything. Then you're looking at multiplying probabilities that get increasingly small the further up the chain you go.
The cool part of this is that you could probably write a quick model in your language of choice to explore it.
My biggest problem with this Taleb piece is that it doesn't really take into account the probability of success from a particular intolerant minority. In practice there's a kind of signal-strength effect where the further up the chain you go the less effective any one person becomes. (At least for the extended GMO example.) Once you factor that into the model Taleb's argument falls apart.
eg. Let's say a given family has a 25% chance of their intolerant child swaying food preferences. (This is very generous, because I'm fairly sure in practice it's under 5%.)
And we'll assume that going up the chain you need at least a 25% threshold to accomplish anything. Then you're looking at multiplying probabilities that get increasingly small the further up the chain you go.
The cool part of this is that you could probably write a quick model in your language of choice to explore it.