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Unless you have an explicit strategy for how and when you will speak out in the future, and explicit reasoning for why that requires silence now, "strategic silence" is just silence.
I don’t think I agree. If my calculus is “speaking out now wouldn’t make a difference and will hurt me/my cause. At some point in the future this might change, but it’s hard to know exactly what that would look like or what kind of action would be called for” I think that’s strategic silence. It may be a bad strategy and weak to future motivated reasoning/value drift, but I’d still call it strategic. Maybe I am being overly pedantic.
Let’s say you live in an authoritarian surveillance. I would consider staying silent about your opinion of the regime both publicly and privately to be strategic.
9Raemon
I think part of the problem is people think of themselves as having at least, like, a medium explicit strategy, but, the strategy routes through some judgment that conveniently keeps returning "not yet" or "only saying things in a somewhat cagey way."
i.e. this advice seems necessary but not sufficient.