Rows 1677, 54048, 93530, and 141774 look anomalous - they should be guaranteed wins but are marked as losses. (3 of them pit 1 Laser Lance & 1 Rail Rifle vs. 2 Arachnoid Abominations.)

Updated choice

My process

My opinion on other entries

A big part of what Evrart is doing is frame setting. What kind of person is he, what is the nature of your relationship with him and how does that relate to specific things that you might do, what is his role in the city, etc.? He comes right out and tells you, trying to directly influence how you think of him and the social scripts & roles that you see as applying. And if you come to him in another frame that he doesn't want, he sidesteps that framing rather than interacting in the role that that frame puts him in.

Also related: his larger-than-life personality. He crafts a personality that 1) fits with the frames he wants (friendly, gregarious, nice) and which 2) gives him leeway for acting outside normal social expectations, such as by putting forward a frame or sidestepping one (it's a strange thing to do but that's Evrart being Evrart). Something about his personality even makes it seem kind of okay for him to put forward frames that seem implausible or inaccurate. (Though IMO he is not able to do this in a way that avoids seeming fishy.)

Updated observations

Updated choices

If I was going to replicate a successful historical meal, it would be

But I'd rather do something original, and

Observations

or "7 Vicious Virtues"

It's interesting that this post is framed in terms of status. That seems more like an illustration of the flexibility of what "status" can mean than something essential to the main point of the post.

I could imagine pretty much the same point being made, with most of the same content, without referencing status at all (for a big success don't just join the default competitive arena). Or it could instead be framed as how to be high status, where big success option is the high-status option (climbing the ordinary competitive ladder is upper-middle class at best, actual high status routes around that whole competition).

Within the compressed summary "Status Is The Game Of The Losers' Bracket", a lot of the post's main content winds up within the particular way that the word "status" is being used here.

I count 5 strategies in this post & the previous one, rather than 3:

1. Blinding. Block information input from the adversary to you.
2. Privacy. Block information output from you to the adversary.
3. Disempowerment. Don't let the adversary have control over parts of the environment that you care about.
4. Vindictiveness. Do things that are opposed to the adversary's interests.
5. Randomness. Do things that are hard for the adversary to predict.

#3 Disempowerment was least explicitly stated in your writing but was present in how you talked about purging / removal from your environment. Examples: Don't have a joint bank account with them, don't appoint them to a be in charge of a department in your organization, don't make agreements with them where they have the official legal rights but there's a handshake deal that they'll share things with you. 

Truman's response to the Red Scare included all (or at least most) of the first 4 strategies. It was primarily #2 Privacy - in fact the Soviet spies were mainly doing espionage - acquiring confidential information from the US government - and purging them was blocking them from getting that information. But Truman was worried about them doing subversion (getting the US government to make bad decisions) which would make purging them #3 Disempowerment. And executing them (rather than just firing them) makes it #4 Vindictive too.

The Madman Theory example in the other post is mainly about vindictiveness (it's a threat to retaliate), even though it's done in a way that involves some randomness.

#5 Randomness feels least like a single coherent thing out of these 5. I'd break it into:

5a Maximin. Do things that work out best in the worst case scenario. This often involves a mixed strategy where you randomize across multiple possible actions (assuming you have a hidden source of randomness).

5b Erraticness. Thwart their expectations. Don't do the thing that they're expecting you to do, or do something that they wouldn't have expected.

Though #5b Erraticness seems like an actively bad idea if you have been fully diagonalized, since in case you won't actually succeed at thwarting their expectations and your erratic action will instead be just what they wanted you to do. It is instead a strategy for cat-and-mouse games where they can partially model you but you can still hope to outsmart them.

If you have been diagonalized, it's better to limit your repertoire of actions. Choose inaction where possible, stick to protocol, don't do things that are out of distribution. The smaller the set of actions that you ever do, the fewer options the diagonalizer has for what to get you to do. A hacker gets a computer system into a weird edge case, a social engineer gets someone to break protocol, a jailbreaker gets an LLM into an out-of-distribution state. An aspiring diagonalizer also wants to influence the process that you use to make decisions, and falling back on a pre-existing protocol can block that influence. I would include this on my list of strategies, maybe #6 Act Conservatively.

Looking back through these, most of them aren't that specific to diagonalization scenarios. Strategies 4 (Vindictiveness) & 5a (Maximin) are standard game theory which come up in lots of contexts. I think that strategies 1-3 fall out of a fairly broad sense of what it means for someone to be an adversary - they are acting contrary to your interests, in a way that's entangled with you; they're not just off somewhere else doing things you don't like, they are in some way using you to get more of the thing that's bad for you. In what ways might they be using you to get more of the thing? Maybe they're getting information from you which they can then use for their purposes, maybe they're trying to influence what you do so you do what they want, maybe you've let them have control over something which you could have disallowed. Strategies 1 (Blinding), 2 (Privacy), and 3 (Disempowerment) just involve undoing/blocking one of those.

That helped give me a better sense of where you're coming from, and more of an impression of what the core thing is that you're trying to talk about. Especially helpful were the diagonalization model at the end (which I see you have now made into a separate post) and the part about "paranoia to me is centrally invoked by high-bandwidth environments that are hard to escape from" (while gesturing at a few examples, including you at CEA). Also your exchange elsewhere in the comments with Richard.

I still disagree with a lot of what you have to say, and agree with most of my original bullet points (though I'd make some modifications to #2 on your division into three strategies and #6 on selective skepticism). Not sure what the most productive direction is to go from here. I have some temptation to get into a big disagreement covid, where I think I have pretty different models than you do, but that feels like it's mainly a tangent. Let me instead try to give my own take on the central thing:

The central topic is situations where an adversary may have compromised some of your internal processes. Especially when it's not straightforward to identify what they've compromised, fix your processes, or remove their influence. There's a more theoretical angle on this which focuses on what are good strategies to use in response to these sorts of situations, potentially even what's the optimal response to a sufficiently well-specified version of this kind of scenario. And there's a more empirical angle which focuses on what do people in fact do when they think they might be in this sort of situation, which could include major errors (including errors in identifying what situation you're in, e.g. how much access/influence/capability the adversary has in relation to you or how adversarial the relationship is) though probably often involves responses that are at least somewhat appropriate.

This is narrower than what you initially described in this post (being in an environment with competent adversaries) but broader than diagonalization (which is the extreme case of having your internal processes compromised, where you are fully pwned). Though possibly this is still too broad, since it seems like you have something more specific in mind (but I don't think that narrowing the topic to full diagonalization captures what you're going for).