Ask HN: Which are the most damaging books you've read? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which are the most damaging books you've read?

25 pointsxstartup19 comments

The books which taught you lots of bad things and damaged your life which took a while to reverse.

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. The idea of objectivism and running the world on your own shoulders is idealistic at best, but for 14-year-old me, it was like a free pass to feel intellectually superior to others. It cost me 2-3 years of my social life to realize that I'm not an island.

Can't up vote this enough. I read it around 16 yrs age and strongly influenced me. "intellectually superior" accurately captures how I felt.

I continued on path of "self discovery" and am much mature now. Now, I strongly recommend NOT to read her books. She takes objectivism to extreme lengths, even in relationships and love. For brief time after reading, I started living like a robot with no room for emotions and treating people like they were machines too with no emotions.

The best cure for Ayn Rand is to simply learn how she lived her own life.

Not personally damaging, but I had a non-trivial amount of friends ruin their lives over "The Secret." It made them believe that the path to success was simply positive visualization, instead of actually working hard to get where you want to go.

I don't remember specific titles, but when I was a kid (probably between 9-12 years old) I had a period of fascination with a lot of pseudo-scientific crap - UFO's, paranormal phenomena, Erik von Daniken stuff, Bermuda Triangle, etc. As all of that stuff is bunk that promotes superstition, magical thinking and is counter to logic, reason and science, I look back at it as at least a waste of time if not exactly "damaging" per-se.

haha same here. And Uri Geller, Lyall Watson's Supernature etc. Later, Findhorn stuff and the nuttier New Age stuff. Later, Adorno.

Reading Nietzsche's Antichrist as an unwise 14 year old hardened me and turned me towards an aggressive atheism which I now realize is naive and pointless.

a kids version of the bible when I was 9

Not me but a friend of mine read a lot of Kafka in his mid-teens, which seemed to strenghten his existential angst.

Anything by Franz Kafka. Reading him when I was 12 years old was a bad, bad, bad, life-changing decision.

I find his short stories " Josephine the singer or the Mouse Folk", "Before the Law" and " The Hunger Artist" to be unbearably painful.

He is still one of my favorite authors.

In the penal colony.

I read all those you mention and more at university. They still stick with me as books I'm very happy to have read, but never want to read again.

"Build your first website," cca 2000. PHP v4 and CSS v1. Need I say more?

'Brave New World' - while I enjoyed it very much, I viewed the world differently after completing it... still do to some degree. Alas, 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain'

Microeconomics: Theory and Applications

Future Shock

All man are mortal. Simone de Beaviour (Destroyed the illusion that anything we try to accomplish survives in the long run - and thus immortality is something worth striving towards.)

The Rise and Fall of Communism & The Dispossesed (Destroyed the illusion that any anarchic/utopic societys can work without a constant surplus with humans instincts - even just channeling human nature away from self destructive cyclic behavior is nearly utopic.)

Blindsight: Peter Watts. Destroyed the illusion that the me is anything more then some wonky software, which s parts can be flipped on and off. Also made me constantly look on gaps and seams in my experience and logic holes. On this book im conflicted- blissful unawareness felt better - but was not better.

the social construction of reality. Read and watch your world unravel

Maybe I want my world to unravel. Added to wish list!

:P Ive recently been reading Ian Hacking's The Social Construction of What? which is a serious yet very entertaining analysis of all those Social Construction of X books and ideas. And probably much more worth reading than any of them.

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