Having read Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" recently, long after I had heard of people recommending it left, right and centre I came to the conclusion that the book says more about the person who reads it and finds it revelatory than it does about society itself. If you believe the world works as the book lays out, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> "How to Win Friends and Influence People" recently, long after I had heard of people recommending it left, right and centre I came to the conclusion that the book says more about the person who reads it

Can you elaborate on this a little bit? I have never read the book mainly because I remember one time in high school, I saw the guy sitting next to me in math class flipping through it.

We had just started the class and we were still trying to figure each other out and befriend each other at the time.

I sort of lost respect for him after seeing him flipping through the book. The title always suggested to me that it was filled with manipulative tactics to get people to do what you want.

No thanks.

The summary of the book could be : if you want to make friends, first, be interested and friendly to people around you. But the book tells you explicitly to not fake it because it would not work anyway. Despite the title, the book is actually not manipulative at all.

It is actually quite funny and old-fashioned because most business examples are coming from the 30's or 40's. ("Mr Smith from the typewriter company...")

You lost respect for someone you didn't know because you saw them reading a book you had not read. You judged a book by its cover in both senses of the phrase.

This 10x.

Also...what if someone just wants more friends in their life, because they're lonely, and don't really know how to be more personable? A book on winning people over seems like a really useful book to have, if you want to, you know, develop relationships with people and aren't very good at it yet.

It's the same problem with coding as it is with socializing. I find reading books about things instead of doing ultimately leads to nothing but anxiety and a warped sense of whatever you're exploring. If you stay in those sorts of books too much it will begin to warp your mind. Taken to the extreme you get communities like 4chan r9k and reddits theredpill that try to boil every interaction down into a transaction.

You have to be well equipped mentally and somewhat socially to not let things like this bend your head.

Sure, you gotta go out and do it, but books are great ways to get at least some sense of what you're doing.

Like sales, in a past life I was selling stuff. I did sales for about 9 months before cracking open a sales book. I recognized that I'd learned to do, through blundering around, about 1/5th of what the book was telling me. Reading about that other 4/5ths really opened my eyes. It gave me stuff to think about and work on. It didn't replace experience, but guided it.

Same with a book about making friends, I think, especially for people who didn't make a lot of friends as a kid, but want more in adulthood.

But there are techniques like Rejection Therapy: processes for getting exactly that kind of practice in an efficient manner, that you can fall back on to feel more confident about each interaction (because you only have one goal, and you can meet it early on.)

I also haven't read Carnegie (I really need to get to it), but I would expect it to be full of things like that, rather than being a treatise on abstract evolutionary sociology.

No, it was because he saw them reading a book he thought was about manipulation. I don't think a reasonable person would lose respect for another because they saw them reading the latest best-seller.

Thanks this was precisely it. It seems a few people misinterpreted my post.

Understandable, the title of the book is really misleading. I think because "winning" friends implies some sort of competition and "influence" often has a negative connotation, like unduly influencing someone to do something not in their own interest.

Its not bad. I think Carnegie, like many men of his generation, had an overly rosy look of society and the book buys pretty deeply into middle-class Christain-Judeo ethics. It definitely fits in more with the win-win idea of striking a deal than the zero-sum scorched earth tactics that because popular later and emphasises relationships, perhaps to the point where a modern person would find it to be butt-kissing.

I'm not exactly sure what the GP meant, but my take is that if you find the book to be revealing it probably means you were buying into middle-class Christian-Judeo ethics anyway, or are good at faking them. If both parties believe in a win-win solution, then they'll probably find it. So its self-fulfilling in a way. The problem is that is highly competitive environments win-win negotiation is a non-starter and these kind of strategies won't work.

Its something of a relic in my opinion. Maybe it made sense in terms of a door-to-door salesmen like Carnegie was, but I can't imagine it being particularly useful today, especially for those looking to run a tech startup. I'd look at books like "Getting to Yes" or various startup specific books instead as a better use of your time.

I gotta ask, what's wrong with Judæo-Christian ethics and win-win solutions? What's wrong with getting along, with doing well by doing good, with honestly trying to be pleasant to others? Would that be the end of the world?

Nothing but if the guy you're negotiating with isn't subscribing to your ethics, then you're at a disadvantage.

To go further: I don't really see a point to any negotiation that isn't a positive-sum game. And not for ethical reasons! To me, it doesn't matter if I or someone else gets more of a pie, because it's still just one pie and talking won't make more of it, so any time spent negotiating has opportunity costs that lower the aggregate ROI of our combined pie-slices. Negotiation spends pie. If the goal is to get the most pie, why waste time negotiating that you could be spending making pie less scarce?

It's interesting to read what others took away from the book in the other replies to your comment. It's not at all what I took away. What I got from it was that every relationship boils down to engineering a way to get income from it. It promotes a game theory/capitalist approach to life where you measure your relationships in how much profit you can make from them. The whole book was about how to treat people so that you can increase your earning power, something I don't really subscribe to. Of course, if that is how you treat and see people, then it will become self-fulfilling. Perhaps it's of no surprise that it's especially popular with the right-libertarian crowd.

It's not so complicated, it's just a book written by and for salesmen intended as sales advice.

It got more popular than that, because the basic premise of the book is that it's a good idea to be genuinely interested in others, and that the best way to get people to like you is to like them. Which is actually fairly insightful.

I'm a basically a leftist bomb throwing communist and I think the book is pretty uncontroversial.

> the best way to get people to like you is to like them.

Perhaps contradicted by the study under discussion...

Interestingly, that wasn't at all what I took away from it. I thought it was about self-awareness and empathy - about understanding that how you are perceived by other people is not necessarily how you perceive yourself, and has more to do with how you fit into their lives than how you fit into your own. You can use that knowledge for good or for evil, and indeed, I thought that Carnegie was encouraging you to use it for good. There is no contradiction between making others feel good and doing well for yourself; if you come to an agreement through flattery and both sides are happy, then you've done well for both of you.

(I understand - and used to subscribe to - the other side as well, that this feels fake, like you're just being manipulative. But that presupposes black & white motives and zero-sum interactions. You can want others to feel good and to do good for them and to do well for yourself all at once, and in most situations there will be no contradiction between all of these. And if there is no external contradiction between them, the only thing that prevents you from making everyone better off is your own psychological hang-ups.)