Dark Arts 101: Winning via destruction and dualism

Recalling first that life is a zero-sum game

It's not a zero-sum game, and you know it, and good dark artists know it, so either this post is supposed to be funny, you're straw-manning dark artists to signal you aren't one of them, or you're trying to shock us with how dark you are. Probability of useful material about how dark arts work, intended to defend against them: low. Probability of useful material about how to succeed darkly by a skilled dark artist: low.

The arena you're practicing the dark arts in also isn't immediately clear. Eventually it looks like you're talking about politics, which makes it unlikely that you've actually put this to practice successfully.

I don't understand why you postulate that "life is a zero-sum game" in this post. What is this one person's gain that is another person's loss here?

Okay, so after reading this a couple of times and reading the comments, I kinda see what Phil was trying to do with this, but the questionable game theory of the first two paragraphs obscures the legitimate point in third paragraph. The questionable game theory is really unnecessary - frame it, if you like, not as assuming life is a zero-sum game but as about creating zero-sum games where they didn't exist before.

So my current guess about your posts is that you're making them progressively more sarcastic to see at what point most of the comments stop being, "Are you serious?"

I'm not sure if this post is being downvoted because people think you're serious, or because it is a silly* post complaining about the two-party system which might be better suited to the Open Thread, or some other reason.

*The complaint itself isn't silly. I tend to agree with a lot of it. But the way it is made here is rather over-the-top.

If there are three parties, why not employ Ernst Stavro Blofeld's strategy, which he illustrated with the parable of the Siamese fighting fish and applied at SPECTRE vis-à-vis the US and the USSR, whereby you incite the other two parties to fight each other, and when the fight is over you swoop in and attack the weakened victor?

48 laws of power has been mentioned before on LW and is a pretty good introduction to 'Dark Arts' (in the sense of acting purely self interestedly). It discusses the idea of seperating people into enenmies and friends in more detail than this.

Recalling first that life is a zero-sum game

People are treating this particular point as a straw man, when I think it's basically true. But the rest of the post is an inaccurate portrayal of such a Dark Artist. IMO, many people think that the world is full of players and chumps, and they intend to be the former rather than the latter. That's not a straw man.

But I don't think such people are concerned with political parties. Unless you're particularly well situated to become king, attempts to manipulate political dynamics is another chump's game. Cozying up to power is not. Flattering the powerful is not. To the extent that tearing down others is useful, it's main use is to flatter those who are not the others, and get on their good side.

In short, the player is more likely to spend his efforts telling people what they want to hear, instead of tearing them down.

I am feeling a strong urge to either vote up or vote down, but I am not sure which.

It's hard for me to draw any conclusion other than that the LessWrong community has become too stupid to communicate with. It would be one thing if people didn't see the phenomenon described here as universal and important. They would be wrong, but understandably wrong, the kind of wrong you can engage with.

But what happened instead, judging from the comments, is that most readers were unable to identify this as a post written adopting a fictitious persona, to get inside the head of someone who would deliberately use such techniques. That autistic-level literal-mindedness, not trying to see what ideas a post presents, not sitting back and taking a few seconds to try framing it different ways, but simply diving in looking for some proposition to object to, is what is ruining LessWrong.