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.

Nonsense. If you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like realistic advice then it is far, far more likely that you are naive, sheltered and yet to escape the moral programming used to keep the lower status folks in check. Or, for most people, the visceral moral revulsion is at the idea of publicly declaring pragmatic behavioural strategies when you are supposed to be speaking bullshit but acting practical.

For approximately the above reasons I consider rwallace's advice in the parent to be outright toxic for a broad class of recipients. In particular, those that lack talent for keeping actual decision making divorced from signalling beliefs.

"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.

This isn't about "Master Yoda", the mentor. This is (obviously) advice about interacting with employers or equivalent leaders in other social contexts that are important.

A mistake that many intelligent people fall into is in thinking that making themselves look good is always the right thing to do. But a lot of the time that is reckless and short sighted. Most bosses like to look like the impressive ones. Your job is to make them look good in front of their superiors and peers in way that they feel inclined to reward you for. Outshining them is seldom the optimal way to do this.

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.

In general I share this attitude. I am willing to sacrifice some potential status and power in return for freedom from playing the game optimally. I also find that people underestimate the options they have for finding political situations which suit them.