> at a personal level: have you ever tried to put in practice "highly skilled, non-naive good faith communication" ? If you did, you've probably noted that more often than not, it doesn't make you weaker. It increases your value, your status, even your financial success.

Opposite experience. It leads to wasting time, especially compared to getting to the same conclusions using more effective, if less 'true', tactics. It just doesn't scale.

At some level good faith is superior on a very large scale, since the reality tends to provide a somewhat consistent feedback, but there remains a local niche of maxxing out persuasion skill tree. Not to beat dead horse, but large organizations with too much resources seem particularly prone - it is an obviously self correcting mechanism, but the tactic remains valid locally.