[rorykoehler]

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.

[CPLX]

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.

[dllthomas]

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

Perhaps contradicted by the study under discussion...

[nostrademons]

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.)