Ask HN: Which books do you wish you'd read earlier in life?

However, I think the important point of the book is that Carnegie succinctly collects a small number of behaviors that will improve your social life if you apply them. So you might not learn something new in the book, but hopefully it will teach you to focus on these known things instead.

I read a lot of movie user reviews on IMDb, and often people rant angrily about incredibly overrated movies, with the impression they're saying something about the movie and not about themselves. Maybe they feel smarter or better than the people who liked it. As if not being able to appreciate something is a virtue.

Anyway, why try to stop people reading a book millions have learnt something from?

This is one of the larger falsehoods I've read in a while.

It's based on money, connections, favors, historical precedent and power. And it's not the only one.

I think the problem we're facing is not in itself the desire to improve ourselves. Rather, it's doing it with the wrong focus and for the wrong reasons.

I found this quote from the article illuminating: "Spicer reflects that he has spent the year focusing on himself to the exclusion of everything, and everyone, else in his life." There is nothing inherently bad about improving your diet, working on your physical fitness or boosting your self-discipline. Becoming healthier and more productive can be worthy goals, but if they cause you to forget the people around you, they are the wrong goals. Self-improvement that is limited to the self is nothing but glorified egocentrism. We can become better athletes, better workers, better anything; but if we don't become better friends/neighbours/partners while we're at it, it won't make us better people.

Secondly, the reasons why we wish to improve ourselves. This is something I cannot talk about without reference to my Christian faith, because the two are deeply intertwined. For my faith tells me that I am not perfect and never can be on this earth, but that that is all right, because God loves me just as I am. At the same time it tells me that God loves me too much to let me stay the way I am, that He has given me an incredible potential that I can develop and that I can work on my imperfections knowing that He will help me. Therefore, when I read books or form habits to improve myself, I am not doing so because I need to, but because I can. I don't have to prove anything to anybody, but I can joyfully grow and develop in areas in which God has given me a greater potential than I have currently reached.

That seemed a strange sentence, so I read the article; still seemed as strange. Not sure what you'd have to believe to be able to write that. If I write—

"There is a great deal of money to be made by those who diagnose and treat our fears of inadequacy; the medical industry takes in ten billion dollars a year."

—hopefully the incoherence is more obvious. It seems the original was ridicule dressed up as science.

I guess I could perceive that because I bought quite a few self-help-type books of various kinds, and got a lot from them; they helped me immeasurably. I'm not really a course/group kind of guy, but I did one 2-week course that was amazing. I don't think any of it was due to my "fears of inadequacy". It was more my wanting to learn about myself/humans, to overcome problems I had from childhood, to be happier, to have better relationships; stuff like that. And I think I've achieved all that. :-D (Well, it's a neverending journey..)

1. Climate change: Ridley calls himself a "luke-warmer". He doesn't deny that a doubling of carbon dioxide causes a 1 degree celsius increase in temperature, but he accumulates various evidence in the book suggesting that estimated feedback effects (water vapor, etc.) are in excess of what's likely. This claim certainly falls into one of the debatable aspects of the book and I'm not an expert to really evaluate it. I think it's a valid criticism that Ridley is excessively optimistic on existential risks. My guess is that he has a Bayesian prior that dooms-dayers are more likely to be wrong than not. He has many examples in the book of experts predicting existential risks in history and being wrong, and I think this colors his view of all experts. I think those historical examples of wrong doomsdayers is an interesting and important perspective.

2. Societal Collapse: I believe Ridley wrote about how the black plague may have been an important catalyst in igniting the renaissaince, so I don't remember him making teleological arguments. I don't think Ridley ever claimed that there won't be problems or collapse, but simply that if you look at the aggregate statistics, humans have been improving dramatically in the last few thousand years, largely driven by new forms of energy in the last few hundred years.

3. Materialism: I don't understand this critique. I already see evidence of movements forming to help people find more meaningful lives: the scientific field of Positive Psychology and Meaning-in-life research by professors such as Dr. Steger, The School of Life, etc.

https://nintil.com/2016/04/09/why-ayn-rand-is-not-and-ought-...

As a philosophy / ethics person who has studied and read a lot of philosophers and never her, even from basic argument structures of hers there are fallacies galore that show no sign of being addressed.

I think the view is a magnet towards selfish people looking for justification of their views. I think her arguments, when viewed objectively (ironically), have the effect mentioned in the top level comment of pushing people away from the pitfall conclusions she makes.

Your reasons for feeling that way are, of course, your own, and I'm hardly one to tell you to do otherwise. But if I could offer any comment on this, let me just say this: there is a LOT of what I would call "caricaturized misrepresentation" of Rand and Rand's work out there in the wild. If your view on reading Rand is based on what you've heard about her from others, I'd strongly suggest you consider carefully if you can trust what you've been told.

On the flip-side, I'll also say this: while I personally am sympathetic to a lot of Rand's thinking / philosophy, I do think she did herself a mis-service in the way she chose to use the words "selfish" and "altruism". That is to say, her usage, while possibly pedantically correct, runs somewhat counter to the common vernacular usage, and it makes it unreasonably easy to misinterpret her meaning, or to impute things that aren't there, whether intentionally or otherwise.

Just to give an over-simplified example of what I mean... Rand never really said, say, "don't give to the poor". But she probably said something roughly like "don't give to the poor because of altruism, do it out of selfish self interest." To anybody educated in the last 30 years or so, that probably sounds very weird, because we tend to assume that "altruism" means something like "a desire to do good to others, like, for example, giving to the poor". But in her world-view, "altruism" was actually just a facade used to misdirect people and get them to buy into a mindset of subjugating the individual to the whims of the collective (and by implication, the self-appointed, corrupt, elitist rulers of the collective). The latter group of people being what she referred to as "moochers" in some of her works.

Likewise, in today's vernacular the word "selfish" has a meaning that's almost negative by its very definition. That is, to say that anything is done for "selfish" reasons is to assume a lack of charity, lack of empathy, a disregard for the welfare of others, evil motives, etc. But that isn't what Rand meant. When she says do things for selfish reasons, she really means "do things because they're what you, as rational, thinking, individual choose to do, without being coerced or manipulated". A person who holds to Rand's ideas can behave in a way that is 180 degrees removed from what we generally think of as "selfish" and still be acting in the "selfish" way that Rand advocates.

Anyway... that got longer than I meant for it to. I'll just finish by saying that I think most people should consider reading at least some of Rand's works and form their own opinions of what she is promoting, rather than simply accepting someone else's interpretation (including mine).

Also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...