The ramrod-stiff principled "centrist" resists in one direction only to be caught unawares on another front and toppled over. But The Boneless Way can resist in any direction without advance warning or visibility.
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Think of designing a building. If you know the prevailing wind is going to N --> S, you can design a stiff building that presents a knife-edge NS and looks like a sail EW. It is vulnerable to anomalous EW winds. But a tree-like not-stiff building can handle any wind direction.
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This might be what did the IDW in ultimately. It adopted a stiff, anisotropic resistance posture against a wind from one direction and made itself highly vulnerable to winds from other directions.
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The first 2 principles in this thread are not quite boneless, since they are meant to counterprogram specific tactics (weaponized "debate" and appeals to first-principles "wonk logic") and therefore exhibit some ideological anisotropy. But they are at least energy-damping.
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There are risks to the boneless way. Recall in the case of the Ents joining the war in LOTR, they only cut short extended slow debate and acted after seeing a bunch of forest already destroyed. Still, when a real-urgency time constraint became evident, they did act to speed up.
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One of the risk-management disciplines in applying the boneless way is learning to tell real urgency emerging from a situation apart from false urgency (or lack of urgency) created by an adversary attempting to alter your tempo of deliberation/action.
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Two kinds of errors: type A: believing false urgency manufactured by an adversary is real, and type B: believing real urgency is false and manufactured by an adversary. The boneless way btw, is to not try to correct anyone's urgency errors except your own.
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Upon googling, I find I've cited Bartleby in the domestic cozy blogchain rather than mediocratopia one. There's an intersection here. Domestic cozy bonelessness is retreat based and tends to cede agency. Strategic mediocrity bonelessness tends to protect and preserve agency.
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Hmm. Wonder if this is worth writing up as a stand-alone blog post outside the blogchain matrix.
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Replying to @vgr
Yes! Or if it does fit in a blogchain, emphasize single post more? I like the blogchain mechanism a lot, but can make it harder for component ideas to stand out So I prefer eg: "Catchy Title Subtitle: part n of x blogchain" vs. something like: "Blogchain Name 9"
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The whole point of the blogchain format is to resist that very temptation 
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Replying to @vgr
Haha imo that 100% makes sense for writing, but once published seems worth adding stronger titles to improve legibility (even if shoehorned a bit). But also I guess not everything has to be a blogchain
0 replies 0 retweets 1 likeThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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