One of the reasons The Boneless Way is particularly apt as a life posture in 2020 is that we are dealing with environments of hugely concentrated power of all sorts. But power is hard to exercise intelligently at scale without the active cooperation of the powerless.
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Power wants docile, intelligent engagement in harmony with its objectives. Eg. clickbait wants you to amplify to your vulnerable friends with an endorsement. Talking points sources would like you to learn, rehearse, and repeat them. Outrage bait seeks harmonic resonance.
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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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Replying to @vgr
Removing the “manufactured by an adversary” from both formulations probably makes it easier to respond to appropriately.
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Adversaries are good Brent
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