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> I avoided this book for a long time. for some reason I got it in my head that it's a sort of red pilled book that teaches you how to manipulate people. FWIW
by nozzlegear 6mo ago
> I avoided this book for a long time. for some reason I got it in my head that it's a sort of red pilled book that teaches you how to manipulate people.
FWIW this book came out in the 1930s, long before "red pilling" was a thing. I've read it before and it's not about manipulating people unless you consider being a genuinely sincere person to be manipulative in some way. It's a good book, if a little outdated, and, if I could summarize it in one glib sentence, its lesson is "If you want people to like you, then be nice to them, be genuine, and show enthusiasm and interest in what they show enthusiasm and interest in."
- planet36 6mo agoAnd "Remember their name".
- drivers99 6mo agoI remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them." The book may say to say their name back to them (I don't remember right now), but that's not what I took away from it. It reminded me of when people would make fun of my name (first and/or last) or bring up someone famous who has the same first ("Donald Duck") or last name ("are you related Joan Rivers?"), or someone famous who sounds like my first and last name put together (Doc Rivers), and I never thought it was funny. When I see people make fun of other people's names, the recipient never seemed to enjoy it either.
- smelendez 6mo agoYeah, you also have to remember that someone has heard every possible joke about their name and their appearance a million times. I do think Dale Carnegie overemphasizes the importance of saying people's names, and in fact saying people's names in conversation often sounds forced and manipulative, but maybe that's just a cultural shift over the past century.
- technothrasher 6mo agoI've got the same last name as a sitcom character from the 1980s. I used to get so tired of people pointing that out. Luckily nobody really remembers the show anymore, let alone the character. But, yeah, it usually sets off my spidey sense when somebody keeps using my first name in conversation. It's just seems weirdly unnecessary, so it makes me wonder why they're doing it.
- cgag 6mo agoI don’t have any problem with my name, and it feels manipulative and overfamiliar and I assume someone’s trying to Carnegie me into something if they use it. Doc Rivers is an awesome name though.
- 98codes 6mo agoSaying someone's name back to them is also a memory trick to help yourself remember their name for next time.
- xp84 6mo agoYou’re for sure right about the name thing. It’s so hard to resist commenting on names for a lot of people, I think, due to the extreme asymmetry of novelty. When you meet someone named Michael Jackson, that’s such novel information to you: “there’s a guy right here in front of me who is named the same thing as a famous musician!” Meanwhile, from Michael’s perspective, they’ve been named Michael Jackson and getting comments and jokes about it near-daily for 35 years - and it’s really a boring non-story - they’re named after their grandfather, their parents didn’t care about the other Michael Jackson one way or the other, and they themselves also neither like or hate MJ.
- et-al 6mo agoMichael... Bolton? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhxRAsnizbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhxRAsnizbk
- xp84 6mo agoThis is 100% what I was thinking of, I considered using that name in my comment actually!!
- philsnow 6mo agoThey might like to hear "Michael Jackson? Like the guy who wrote the book about scotch??" once in a while
- Slow_Hand 6mo agoI had a friend named Michael Jackson who went by a different first name. I didn't even know until several years later when he showed a group of us his drivers license and accidentally outed himself.
- c22 6mo agoThis is like when you're working retail and the scanner glitches or the barcode isn't registered and the customer says "I guess that one's free then!" and you have to say "ha ha, very droll sir" as if you didn't hear that same joke yesterday.
- nozzlegear 6mo agoMy full first name is Joshua, but when I was a kid everyone would just call me Josh. That was until 5th grade, when another Josh joined my class, and whose last name just happened to come right before mine in the roll call. I loathed that he "stole" my name and (in my head) made me sound like the repeat, so from that point on I decided that I would be Joshua because it sounded "fancier" to me. Years later, my choir teacher would sing that old "Joshua fought the battle of Jericho" song whenever he passed me in the hallways, which always made me laugh.
- technothrasher 6mo agoI've got a life long friend who's full first name is Josh, derived from the Japanese name Yosh. People often try to call him Joshua and it annoys the hell out of him.
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- lovemenot 6mo agoYosh would always be an abbreviation in Japanese. And only done for foreigners, not for other Japanese. Yoshihiro or Yoshiyuki would likely be called Yoshi by their friends.
- jodrellblank 6mo ago> "I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them."" Nobody made fun of my name particularly, it's not like anyone famous, I just don't like it very much. I don't call myself by my name in my head, or on the internet. For most of my life my friends and coworkers had nicknames for me and I prefered that. I associate my name with official paperwork, formal situations, negative situations, aquaintances, and salespeople. Perhaps because of this I have a bit of fixation on names (people, places, and products) and judging them to sound good or bad. Some names sound great or fine and it's no surprise to me if 'Robert' likes his name and likes hearing it. But I struggle to imagine that people called 'Helpless' or 'Abuse-not'[1] thinking those are the most beautiful sound in the world. [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/puritan-names-lists-of-bizarre-religious-nomenclature-used-by-puritans.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/puritan-names-lists...
- helterskelter 6mo agoHah. I'm ADHD and I used to be terrible about remembering people's names -- like, their names didn't even register and I couldn't tell you what it was 30 seconds later. It wasn't that I didn't care about the person, it was just that their name would never stick. Anyway, I finally made enough people feel bad and embarrassed myself enough that I started compensating and made a point to remember basically everybody's name that I met. The change was really surprising, people notice that sort of thing and they make an effort to return the same kind of energy. My general attitude about people since then has become a lot more positive because I realized that overall, most people really don't need a whole lot of impetus to show their better side, and it's not like it costs me anything to treat somebody with a little more consideration.
- GolfPopper 6mo agoAs someone with very similar issues with names, how did you start remembering names?
- sanswork 6mo agoI have a list in reminders called names so when someone tells me their name as soon as I can use my phone without it being impolite I open it up and add a quick note with the names. - neighbour watering lawn Jack, wife Gemma, daughter Jane Then I try to remember it later in the day and confirm with the note. I do that the next couple days and it's locked in and I can delete the note.
- ssl-3 6mo agoI've found that the same works for me when I put forth the tiny bit of time and effort to actually do it. Just a quick note somewhere (phone is easy-enough, or for a long time I carried a waterproof Field Notes notebook with a Fisher Space Pen and that worked a bit better), to be reviewed later. Maybe that review happens an hour from now. Maybe it happens in a week, or a month. Or maybe all of these. Refreshers are good. I don't even have to write much, if anything, about the person; the mere act of taking down the names usually helps a ton with my ability to recall the context later. If I can remember when and where I took that note (which I can often do very easily), then the rest of the details fill themselves in quite nicely. (I don't erase the notes, so as to let them remain useful to me later. I don't care if that creeps anyone out; my intentions are pure and the problem I'm trying to solve is very real. Its creep-value is really no worse than the contact lists that I've transferred between cell phones, pocket computers, and now pocket supercomputers for nearly a quarter of a century.)
- scotty79 6mo agoOh, no, please don't. Don't use my name before we are actual friends with actual business in remembering each others names. There's very few things that more strongly put me on alert against a person than them mentioning my name to me.
- nunez 6mo agoIf I'm trying to remember someone's name, I'll say it at the end of interactions more often than I normally would and make some kind of memory device out of it. If it's someone at a place I frequent, I'll add a location based reminder. It's a little much, but I've found that people, more often than not, do like being called by their names.
- Scarblac 6mo agoThat said, it also has all the self help faults. It repeats itself a lot, is full of happy anecdotes that repeat the same thing yet again, and could have fit in a chapter.
- xamuel 6mo agoI find that I don't necessarily mind when a book repeats itself, and a good helping of anecdotes can help a point get across. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Trying to distill a book down to the minimum logically equivalent length is like eating the smallest possible portion of a supplement one time and then wondering why it doesn't do anything for you.
- et-al 6mo agoI agree with you this was not Dale Carnegie's intent when he wrote the book, but alexmuresan probably takes issue because the "red pilling" crowd have used Carnegie's advice to manipulate people. Personally, salespeople have randomly complimented me and repeated my name over and over, and on the receiving end it weirded me out. So the problem is that in certain situations there is an overarching "what did you want to get out of that person?". Don't be those people. Strike up conversations because you enjoy people and their stories.
- SoftTalker 6mo agoYes, the problem is that every scammer and salesman uses these techniques also, and if you've run into a few of them, having a complete stranger approach you with the standard Dale Carnegie playbook immediately sets off alarm bells.
- porknubbins 6mo agoYes this is obvious if you think about movies where people become friends or romantic partners- they are usually cold or unfriendly to each other in the first meeting which makes their later connection seem more authentic. I cannot imagine a movie post 1950s in which a man uses these tactics and gets the girl or the sale without difficulty. Of course movies are not real life but they do rely on some verasimilitude.
- aidenn0 6mo agoThat's because a movie like that would be boring (at least if it took up more than a minimal amount of screen-time). Interesting stories require some form of conflict, and for movies that focus on romance, the conflict will be interpersonal.
- ravenstine 6mo agoYeah, that's it exactly. Films aren't reality, although they can be a reflection of what we might think how reality should go. Af the end of the day, films are made to capture an audience, not to paint a perfect portrait of the real world. Also, there are counterexamples to that person's claim, such as the film Before Sunrise, which is an excellent romance film that doesn't involve an arc where the characters are indifferent or dislike each other at first. The films Sideways and even Office Space defy that trope as well.
- axus 6mo agoMr. Carnegie should update his book with a few sentences about how using LLMs to flatter people is not being genuine.
- StevePerkins 6mo agoThat would be quite a feat, given that Mr. Carnegie was born in the 1800's and died over 70 years ago. I'm convinced that 99% of the people who criticize or even just talk about that book have never actually read it, and have zero idea what they're talking about. It's just in that Ayn Rand bucket of books that people talk about, because they see other people getting likes and upvotes for it.
- Silamoth 6mo agoAyn Rand was a pretty terrible person. But you’re right that there are some interesting ideas in her books. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is exceedingly interesting as a person living genuinely without much regard for societal norms and expectations. There’s some weird stuff in that book, but Howard Roark is very interesting. A trimmed down version of The Fountainhead would be much better received, I think. (It’s over 700 pages and has some odd and unnecessary scenes where some of Ayn Rand’s less-than-great views probably shine through. It would also just benefit from some good editing.)
- nephihaha 6mo agoAyn Rand was never the type to submit to heavy editing. There is a better novel hiding in there to be sure.
- Tangurena2 6mo agoDune is a pretty good book and I attribute that to a ruthless editor. After the author died, the son published many of the notes (sort of the way JRR Tolkien's son did) and one of the books shows several early drafts of the first novel - most of which were stinkers. The notes filled an entire room and he managed to squeeze 15 novels out of them.
- salynchnew 6mo agoIf Books Could Kill (which is notoriously against self-help books) did an episode on Dale Carnegie. Even they said that he seemed to be a pretty alright guy who was genuinely nice to people in his personal life, not just in his public persona.
- maroonblazer 6mo agoSomeone turned me onto this podcast several months ago and, after a few episodes, my takeaway was they seem to be against every book they review. I couldn't find a single book they actually liked.
- heddhunter 6mo agoAssuming you're not joking, that's the point of the podcast... hence the title "If Books Could Kill". They're reviewing bad and possibly dangerous books.
- framapotari 6mo agoYour takeaway is right in line with their tagline: "The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds"
- altmanaltman 6mo agoDid they review the original text of the 1930s book that captures the intent of the writer or the scrubbed latest version which washes away the sexist, racist and problematic text written by the original author? He was as nice as they can be for a white man living in 1930. Good for fellow white men, not good for anybody female or a different skin tone. But the book has been changed over time to make it seem like he was always an "pretty alright guy"
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- chistev 6mo agoI've not read the book, but how can a book about talking to people (if that's what it is) be a "little outdated"?
- komali2 6mo agoSome of the stories / aphorisms refer to things that just like, don't exist anymore.
- nozzlegear 6mo agoYeah, that's what I meant by it being outdated. He uses a lot of examples and aphorisms from the 1930s, which sometimes come off as a little bit quaint or folksy almost 100 years later. I'll also mention that the book was written for men "influencing" other men; any reference to women in the book is usually in the context of them being objects that should be managed using the author's techniques.
- nozzlegear 6mo agoI'm not sure why this would be downvoted. I hope that people consider treating women like objects to be outdated and problematic.
- Tangurena2 6mo agoThe backlash against the MeToo movement shows that that treatment is not as outdated/problematic as it should be.
- dweekly 6mo agoMy read on the book was "humans are really good at telling if you genuinely care about them or not and will respond well to that, so you should genuinely care about the people around you, and good things will result from that overall, especially if you're not super mercenary about it." Bill & Ted said it most pithily: be excellent to each other.
- KingFelix 6mo agoGreat quote choice!
- mabster 6mo agoThat's pretty close to "be like Keanu Reeves"!
- calf 6mo agoThen that's a fallacious argument on several levels, e.g. because as the reader I am also a human who can tell, and so on.
- weregiraffe 6mo agoHow can you make yourself genuinely care about something you don't care about? It sounds as plausible as changing your own sexual orientation.
- iamben 6mo agoMaybe just me, but two things - 1. You don't care about X until you do. Like, you can go for years without worrying cholesterol. And then you can have a reason to care about it and all of a sudden you do. The reason can come from something that forces your hand or just because you take an interest in a subject. 2. Altruism. Think less about care and more just doing without expecting anything back. People notice, especially with selfless conversation.
- roenxi 6mo agoNot sure what the downvotes are for on this one. It depends a lot on what "genuine care" is supposed to mean. If you want to interpret that as a subconscious feeling then you're right. Feelings aren't normally controllable and calling them up on demand is pretty much impossible. That being said, if you go through a bit of game theory and apply it to the real world - the experience of the last few millennia of recorded history is the strategy most likely to get people what they want is lots of communication and setting up win-win deals for everyone. Someone who reliably offers win-win deals has a natural advantage over the more common person who thinks in terms of win-lose deals. Communities that make a habit of setting up win-win deals for their members have an overwhelming advantage over those that don't. If you tap in to that type of thinking it tends to translate into taking a real interest in how other people are going because it is easier to set win-win deals up if you know what their problems and goals are. And a sensible sub-strategy is making sure to be as kind as possible to everyone to get into the habit of thinking empathically and keep channels of communication as open as possible. So if "genuine care" means you literally feel something... nobody has much use for your feelings, we can't tell what your feelings are anyway and you probably can't call them up on demand. If "genuine care" means you try to figure out what other people want and then help them get it then that's simply good strategy and most people should find their way to it if they think about it for long enough. Some people have to think a bit harder than others and there are a few rare maniacs who really just want to cause pain and suffering. The maniacs are bad news.
- cromka 6mo agoAgreed. Although speaking from the memory, the chapter on keeping wife happy is best not taken literally in modern day and age. It dated considerably, considering how women are way independent nowadays, even if at the time it was relevant.
- xyzelement 6mo agoI am curious what it was that made you say this. In general I am of the opinion that a happy woman is a happy woman and that this doesn't look fundamentally different in 2026 than it did in 1926.
- morganw 6mo ago> FWIW this book came out in the 1930s, long before "red pilling" was a thing. but long after The Prince was a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince
- Titan2189 6mo agoI've only heard of the Red Pill in reference to the Matrix. Does it have that idea from "The Prince"?
- hattmall 6mo agoThe Prince is the basic concept of red-pilling. I.e. take the red pill and be exposed to the realities of the world where nice guys finish last. No literal red-pill as in the Matrix but the ideas that mainstream "red-pilling" espouses are those of The Prince.
- JohnBooty 6mo agoNo, The Prince is very literal. Inspiration for the red pill (which represents choosing knowledge, however ugly, over pleasant ignorance) would be more like... the apple in the Garden of Eden. Or the Allegory of the Cave maybe. Or Alice in Wonderland (which Morpheus directly mentions in the Matrix) Redpillers latched onto that red pill imagery because they view themselves as, you know, having the best grasp on reality. Unlike the poor ignorant masses. Or so they believe. "Redpilled" views do have some things in common with Realpolitik, and The Prince, in the sense that they're kind of nakedly amoral and rather ugly.
- altmanaltman 6mo agoI think the red pill is a direct reference to the matrix. Its kind of weird they have such degratory views on sex and gender, given the directors of their favorite movie they cant stop talking about.
- JohnBooty 6mo ago
- salad-tycoon 6mo agoI read it as a socially awkward but very bookish very young teen. My one quote summary is “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” I never became Mr. Popular but found it very helpful in trying to understand somethings that were unobtainable for me at the time. I need to read it again, I think about it a few handful of times a year, many years later.
- wink 6mo agoI don't want to be too generalizing, but I found the book to be matching a lot of American cultural stereotypes (as I have experienced them) and most of it would just seem corny (but not terrible) to most people from European countries (less in the south or UK maybe). Like, I don't even disagree with what he wrote, but most of the stuff just felt a little out of place and intruding on people who generally want to be left alone or keep it to small talk on a different level.
- nozzlegear 6mo agoI read it over 10 years ago now so I can't remember too much of it, but I mentioned in another comment that the book is so old the author's anecdotes and aphorisms came off as folksy and quaint. I can definitely understand it matching American stereotypes.
- ericmcer 6mo agoA woman who I used to talk to when I worked at a grocery store said something similar to me: "People will forget what was said but they never forget how they feel". We do get caught up in like "I shouldn't have said x or y" when the reality is if you make other people feel nice they will want to have you around. If you say the perfect words but overall make them feel bad they won't want you around.
- lanamo 6mo agoalso interesting: Dale Carnegie admired Alfred Adler, the Austrian psychologist; Adler said “the solution to the world’s present problems lies in social interest: concerned relationships between people and groups”. Adler never rose to fame (in the west) - but he also didn't care about it. the book "The Courage to Be Disliked" is about Alfred Adler.