I don’t really think this is a stupid thing to say. It’s true that many of these conflict-escalation-flavoured strategies work when you are in certain kinds of situations (e.g. when you know your “opponent” well, or they are tied to you in some way, or norms and procedures bind their hands). Some of the quotes in the original post describe various forms of behaviour that would be called abusive or antisocial in particular contexts (the one about repeated escalation by abusing vague boundaries and the unwillingness of the other party to enforce said boundaries due to mutual unpleasantness is a classic). It’s also true that, absent such kinds of deep knowledge of opponent psychology or other forms of psychological leverage, fog of war makes lots of signals and seemingly coherent plans completely warped and distorted.
I don’t really think this is a stupid thing to say. It’s true that many of these conflict-escalation-flavoured strategies work when you are in certain kinds of situations (e.g. when you know your “opponent” well, or they are tied to you in some way, or norms and procedures bind their hands). Some of the quotes in the original post describe various forms of behaviour that would be called abusive or antisocial in particular contexts (the one about repeated escalation by abusing vague boundaries and the unwillingness of the other party to enforce said boundaries due to mutual unpleasantness is a classic). It’s also true that, absent such kinds of deep knowledge of opponent psychology or other forms of psychological leverage, fog of war makes lots of signals and seemingly coherent plans completely warped and distorted.