Ryan Hol­i­day on the mil­i­tary strate­gist John Boyd’s low­ball ‘tech­nique’:

John Boyd had a rule that when­ever he was using data as sup­port for an argu­ment, he’d deflate the num­bers to under­state his case. The idea was use lower num­ber while mak­ing a strong case; when he was chal­lenged and fact checked, it’d always be worse when the new cal­cu­la­tions came in. A lot of peo­ple con­fuse this with man­ag­ing expec­ta­tion, but it’s a philo­soph­i­cally dif­fer­ent way to think about strat­egy. Gen­er­ally, he fig­ured, that when peo­ple have a big stick they use it. To not use it, to keep it hid­den, the mark of a dif­fer­ent breed of person.