[pure-awesome]

People may call it "stupid" but as a meta-strategy or species strategy or whatever, it's actually pretty effective.

There are actually plenty of adversarial situations in which it's beneficial to give yourself a handicap in order to win. If you're playing "chicken" (where you drive cars at each other and whoever turns away first loses) you can blindfold yourself and remove the steering wheel. If you're doing Mutually Assured Destruction, you can set up an automatic retaliation system which you are unable to pause or cancel. By removing some of your options, you can effectively signal to your opponents so that they are forced to respond to your strategy.

Similarly, it can be beneficial to act "irrationally", because if your opponents are rational actors, they won't even try the strategy against you. E.g. If I know you will "irrationally" come for revenge after the fact even to your own detriment despite the fact that it won't fix anything, I might not try something against you in the first place.

[itronitron]

>> it can be beneficial to act "irrationally"

I have seen this pursued with gusto as a career development strategy on occasion and it works rather well unfortunately. The basic approach is to be so outlandish, unprofessional, and unreliable that capable and rational colleagues will pick up the slack, confident that the crazy person will be quickly gotten rid of due to their bad behavior, however that very rarely happens. The irrational actor ends up being promoted because they are the most visible person on the project as everyone else is in hiding in anticipation of a shit-storm.

[raxxorrax]

I have seen that too. Some even got promoted to break in some hardened structures in companies.

It can have appeal to some. And there is the fact that the standard 100% professional corporate culture is extremely unappealing and in contrast to such behavior.

[IAmEveryone]

That sounds more like an application of signaling theory, I e. “They must be very smart to be allowed this behavior”.

The canonical example for OP is the “mad man” strategy Reagoj supposedly followed.

[atoav]

Why does this remind me of a certain english speaking nation editing the EU?

[ben_w]

The UK strategies appear to come from Dominic Cummings, whose blog reading list indicates they’re a fan [0] of the Rationality philosophy, and who has apparently made this exact behaviour an explicit part of the political strategies of the UK government on the grounds of game theoretic expected value etc.

[0] Other people more qualified than me to discuss the matter have argued variously that he is merely a fan — superficial familiarity but missing the point — or that he is reflective of the wider Rationality movement.