I see no way to interpret it that would make it true. Civil disobedience serves to provoke a response that will—alone among crises that we know about—decrease people’s attitudes of obedience or submission to “traditional” authority. In the obvious Just-So Story, leaders who will use violence against people who pose no threat might also kill you.
We would expect this Gandhi trick to fail if the authorities get little-to-none of their power from the attitude in question. The nature of their response must matter as well. (Meanwhile, as you imply, I don’t know how Moldbug wants us to detect strength. My first guess would be that he wants his chosen ‘enemies’ to appear strong so that he can play underdog.)
I don’t think we are disagreeing on substance. “Underdog” and similar labels are narrative labels, not predictive labels. I interpreted Moldbug as saying that treating narrative labels as predictive labels is likely to lead one to make mistaken predictions and / or engage in hindsight bias. This is a true statement, but not a particularly useful one—it’s a good first step, but not a complete analysis.
Thus, the extent to which Moldbug treats the statement as complete analysis is error.
I see no way to interpret it that would make it true. Civil disobedience serves to provoke a response that will—alone among crises that we know about—decrease people’s attitudes of obedience or submission to “traditional” authority. In the obvious Just-So Story, leaders who will use violence against people who pose no threat might also kill you.
We would expect this Gandhi trick to fail if the authorities get little-to-none of their power from the attitude in question. The nature of their response must matter as well. (Meanwhile, as you imply, I don’t know how Moldbug wants us to detect strength. My first guess would be that he wants his chosen ‘enemies’ to appear strong so that he can play underdog.)
I don’t think we are disagreeing on substance. “Underdog” and similar labels are narrative labels, not predictive labels. I interpreted Moldbug as saying that treating narrative labels as predictive labels is likely to lead one to make mistaken predictions and / or engage in hindsight bias. This is a true statement, but not a particularly useful one—it’s a good first step, but not a complete analysis.
Thus, the extent to which Moldbug treats the statement as complete analysis is error.