The shoot-the-moon strategy

One interesting facet is that all these examples have a common mechanism: injecting noise into the signal in order to disguise the signal. At least, if you consider oil spatters on your shoes as a "signal" that the shoes are dirty. This works when we simply want to eliminate the signal, or when we can ensure that the intended recipient can still pick it up. Can we find more examples using this mechanism?

One might be political campaign funding. Politicians want to accept bribes, and many people and institutions want to give them bribes in exchange for favors. They can't do this openly, so disguise is called for. One way to disguise political bribes is to hide them. Another way, though, is to create an environment in which there are lots of conversations about the political desires of constituents, and lots of ways to make campaign contributions, so that it becomes very hard to identify a particular set of conversations and monetary transactions that constitute a quid pro quo. And that's exactly what we see, at least in American politics.

Another is flirtation. People want to express their romantic interest in each other, but maintain plausible deniability. One way is to be really subtle, starting from near-zero flirtation and gradually escalating the flirtatiousness, gathering information all the while on mutual availability and interest. The "shoot the moon" strategy is to be outrageously flirtatious with everybody, and use the openness this generates in order to gather the same information. The "plausible deniability" here is akin to the political campaign funding example.

A third is offensiveness in the arts. If you make art that's a little bit offensive, it can wither under social disapproval. Make art that's extremely offensive, and it becomes a Statement that demands greater reflection, or attracts enough defenders and fans to support the artist (because of who it offends).

In the offensiveness example, I'm not sure if anything's being disguised via an injection of noise, but it still feels aligned with the "shoot the moon" strategy.

Maybe a different way to describe it is "biphasic." It's any intervention where a little bit is harmful, but a lot is helpful. It simply happens that "injection of noise" is a mechanism that is an example of a biphasic intervention, but there are many other biphasic mechanisms as well. Obviously, there's also the reverse: interventions where a little bit is helpful, but too much is harmful. It seems possible to me that people tend to neglect the possibility that interventions are biphasic.

My guess is that many biphasic interventions are challenging and risky to execute, but a profitable niche to occupy if you can do it successfully.

A browser extension AdNauseam clicks on all ads on the website (opening them in background, so you don't actually see them), so that advertisers' profiles of you become full of noise.

In the board game Citadels, the players pick one of the 8 special roles every turn. Every role has unique powers. However, you are at a big disadvantage if the other players can guess correctly which role you have. And it turns out that some people (e.g. my partner) are especially good at guessing my behaviour, even when I am trying to do something unpredictable.

So what I do often is choosing the role card randomly, taking the card face-down, communicating this way to the others that I have no clue which role I am getting. I found it to be a surprisingly good strategy

Another hypothetical example: if you're worried about someone finding your porn collection and discovering your embarrassing fetishes, just download a bunch more for other fetishes you're not actually interested in, and then you can say "I am not necessarily interested in any specific one of those".

One of my go-to examples is crash-only code: graceful shutdown is complicated, so instead you always crash and make your code crash-proof.

This is my favourite LW post in a long while. Trying to think what the shoot-the-moon strat would be for AI risk, ha.

Since I first heard of controversy around ballot selfies, I've thought that an alternative to prosecuting those who take them would be to facilitate fake ballot selfies.

I was going to say you could implement this by letting people surrender a filled-out-but-not-submitted ballot to a poll worker in exchange for a new one, but you can probably already do this if you just say you made a mistake? In that case polling sites would just need to put posters up telling people to do this if they are under pressure of any kind to produce a ballot selfie.

Another (fictional) example: The Mr. Burns approach to disease immunity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0euMFAWF8

I think it's called signal jamming? An alarm that sounds all the time is just as useless as an alarm that never goes off.