
Ask HN: Which are the most damaging books you've read? - xstartup
The books which taught you lots of bad things and damaged your life which took a while to reverse.
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slimshady94
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.

~~~
umbs
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.

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seattle_spring
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.

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mindcrime
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.

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

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meri_dian
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.

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Pica_soO
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.

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bedane
a kids version of the bible when I was 9

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Ice_cream_suit
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.

~~~
thisone
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.

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

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BinaryBuddha
'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'

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

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itronitron
Microeconomics: Theory and Applications

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soyrunner
Future Shock

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throwaway1254
the social construction of reality. Read and watch your world unravel

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

~~~
yesenadam
: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.

