It's important to understand the intended context of these rules. They're mostly about how to rise within established hierarchies. At one time that would have meant the nobility of a country. In modern developed nations, that means a large corporation, or a governmental bureaucracy. Anyone who has spent time playing inside that kind of game will recognize most of these rules and understand what they're about.

The rules can't be gotten round, because anybody who comes in and plays by them will beat out anybody who doesn't. It's just game theory. It can't be circumvented, because in an environment like a large corporation, there are always real limits on how many people each person can know well enough to trust. Absent intimacy and trust, the dynamics revert to each person playing a hand that only they can see.

In such a hierarchy, the question of whether this behavior is optimal, or "good" or "evil" is, in practice, moot. If you don't figure out and follow the rules, you'll be trampled, and pushed either down or out. If you discover a different set of rules that work better, then you can write a book about it. And yes, it is zero-sum. It has to be zero-sum, because there is much less space in the top of a pyramid than there is in the pyramid. There's no outcome where everybody gets to be a boss.

Unfortunately, I don't think you're likely to get much informed insight on this topic on LW, given our apparent demographics. College students taking math and physics just won't have the experience. Internships aren't enough. I've only scratched the surface myself, just from studied observation during my 5 years at Microsoft. You need to talk to some 30-50 year old general managers / executives that have risen through the ranks of an organization like IBM, Lockheed, Microsoft, Citigroup, etc.

I have an exercise for you - I often want to recommend it to people, so now I've given in and done it. It seems like you aren't generating many ideas when you think "how could this be wrong?" If you aren't asking "how could this be wrong" (or incomplete) in the first place, that's easy to fix - start doing that. But if you already are and don't find that ideas come easily, try this exercise:

Manfred's magical exercise of power: Find an interesting-looking item nearby (for example, on my desk is a small tube of epoxy putty, which hardens when the two colors are molded together). Name, out loud, things it could be (It is a stick of high explosive. It is a dog treat. It is a piston for an engine. It is a meal in a can. It is sidewalk chalk.) until you can't think of any more ideas, even silly ones, or maybe especially silly ones, within 20 seconds. Then stop and think until you find one last idea. Repeat with more objects.

This exercise comes from an improv game I've played that I found helpful to my idea-generating ability. In the improv game the object is passed around in a circle. (It is an ant monolith. It is frozen colored milk. It is the finger of an alien. It is a pawn in a chess set.)

What is remarkable is that, when I think of my experiences in hindsight, Real Life does appear to work this way

A common effect for all sorts of things. However, to the extent that we manage to create any wealth at all, to the extent that the nouveau riche these days have made their money by starting companies rather than by parasitizing "the master," etc, real life doesn't work this way.

I would agree that manipulation, market norms and ruthlessness can sometimes help, but specifically these 48 vague dictums are not a complete theory of how to get ahead, and calling them the "laws of power" is needless - it's as if they were written by a self-help author just trying to sell books. Oh wait.

Of possible interest: Eliezer Yudkowsky did a bloggingheads.tv diavlog with Robert Greene, co-author of The 48 Laws of Power. The diavlog was mostly about Greene's sequel, The 50th Law, co-authored with rapper 50 Cent.

(They must say what happened to the 49th law, but I don't remember it.)

The question I'd like to ask is this: are they rational? As in, would everyone's lives improve or worsen from following this? Unlike riches and actual achievements, competition for power does seem to be a Zero Sum Game, at least in a society that isn't expanding (demographically or by conquest or otherwise).

Completely aside from any relevance to Greene's book I don't like what you have done to the word 'rational'. That isn't what the word means. 'Rational' does not mean 'good, prosocial and the sort of thing the in group must endorse'. It means 'can doing X be expected to maximise the satisfaction of the agent's inclusive preferences?'. If you want to talk about social good that's ok, just call it social good!

I think, if in doubt, you could do a lot worse than use this as a list of guidelines for what not to do. It's designed to sell by masking itself as frightfully hard-nosed realism while actually appealing to the audience's baser instincts.

What does 'baser instincts' mean? Recall that in the Stone Age, life was mostly a zero-sum game. Wealth was mostly foraged, not farmed or manufactured. You spent your life in the tribe you were born in, which was unlikely to grow or find new opportunities except at the expense of another tribe. You couldn't win except by making somebody else lose. None of these things are anywhere near true anymore, but evolution hasn't caught up; we still have instincts honed for that environment, against which our main antidotes are a sense of moral value together with a widening of the scope of what we consider our tribe. In other words, if you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like hard-nosed, realistic advice, it's quite likely that your visceral reaction is correct and the advice is wrong.

"Never outshine the master"? Wrong. A master worth having, would have it no other way. A master not worth having is, well, not worth having.

"Conceal your intentions"? Wrong. Make your intentions clear, then follow through on them. It attracts those who would deal honestly with you, and deters would-be aggressors so that a fight doesn't have to start in the first place.

"Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit"? Only if you want your employees to be those who know they can't find work elsewhere. The competent are no longer permanently stuck in the positions into which they were born.

"Learn to keep people dependent on you"? Then you'll be able to keep them in the mud and your boots on their faces slightly higher in the mud - meanwhile, those who fostered independent allies, will be climbing the highest peaks.

"Play a sucker to catch a sucker: play dumber than your mark"? Only if you want to become entangled with suckers. If your own self-interest really matters to you, don't exploit suckers, just stay away from them.

(Okay, granted there are a few pieces of often-good advice, like "Always say less than necessary" and "Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop". You can't literally use this list as anti-advice. But on the whole, it's bad.)

Caveat: if your life's ambition is to become chief of your tribe, then to a certain extent you are playing a zero-sum game after all, and perhaps this advice may serve you well. But outside that, if you ever find yourself in a situation where it starts looking like good advice, that may be a warning sign you have stumbled into a zero-sum game. In that case, don't spend your efforts on becoming good at it. Spend them on getting the hell out of it.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

The laws aren't much more than basic elements of strategy combined with basic status manipulation - there really isn't anything among them that should be controversial at all.

Two of possible points of confusion are 1) They are descriptive, not prescriptive and 2) It's important to know which are about status and which are about strategy, since that helps guide where they should be applied.

If everyone followed the rules of this book, would we ever get anything done?

I would expect a massive increase in productivity (among people local in personality space). In part due to working around the worst of why our kind can't cooperate.

So should these social, anti-productive tendencies, be fought with education, or should they be embraced?

Education is definitely not the right term for what you describe. At least, not without enclosing the description in quotation marks.

Sounds like Slytherin to me.

Use it if you need it, but don't pretend that it's actually creating value.