The Virtue of Selfishness

What Hacker News says

1. dmfdmfApr 2023
   > The power of Capitalism, on the other hand, comes from its hard-nosed acceptance of humanity at its worst.

   I had to stop here because that is such a superficial and erroneous summary of Rand's views (she explicitly argued the opposite) that it indicates he never understood her or is intentionally misrepresenting her ideas or smearing her.

   In any case, Rand is not going away and if anyone is interested in why you need to read her books for yourself. She was crystal clear in her writing and you may disagree with her but she will definitely challenge your own beliefs. I recommend starting with The Virtue of Selfishness and Philosophy: Who needs it.

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2. rgloverMar 2023
   - Awareness by Anthony DeMello

   - The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi

   - The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

   - Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove

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   More stuff here: http://www.ryanglover.net/library/ (not flagged specific to entrepreneurship but all have had an influence in one way or another).

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3. mindcrimeMar 2023
   The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

   I love seeing this on your list. Firstly because it's a great book, and secondly just because Rand is so under-appreciated in general. Especially here on HN where her name seems to be all but verboten for some strange reason.

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4. cc101Oct 2022
   While I have advance well beyond Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness", her book was the most empowering philosophic perspective in my 76 years of life. Don't imagine that I think much of her followers today because I don't. However, her book attacking self-denial and guilt has provide the foundation for my empowerment.
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5. maxharrisMar 2021
   If you don't have a lot of money to invest, it's far better to put that cash into developing yourself. That can be as simple as reading books such as The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen or The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, or following an interest you already have (mine are things like machining, chemistry, structural engineering, neon art).

   If you have a business idea, one of the best books I've read is The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto Savoia. Making stuff is a lot easier than learning whether or not you're on the right track without spending everything you have.

   The last thing I'd suggest is to be concerned with history and America's oncoming fascist trainwreck. Peikoff wrote The Ominous Parallels forty years ago, and his words are every bit as chilling as they are prescient.

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6. atypicaluserDec 2020
   To answer your second question first, The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand started me down this path. The sheer brazenness of the title made me pick it up: what I read over the next few days broke me. Or the old me.

   I've long left Rand behind, but she's a good start for a bare-knuckle punch to the teeth regarding altruism, egalitarianism and the beliefs of the political Left.

   Later I picked up the usual suspects: the Greeks, the Stoics, the modern philosophers. Read the classics of the East and of India, read more modern mystics, read the pragmatists, the existentialists and the Communists. Read the economists (Adam Smith et al.) Read Popper, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Heidegger, Rawls, Kripke, Kuhn, Habermas, etc.

   I guess if I were to recommend a starting point, I'd start with Book One of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature. Be sure to heed the title of the book--it's a discussion of human nature, not of the world as-is, as-was or as-will-be. And the first book explores how we understand the world (i.e. ideas) and the limits of our understanding. Note it's a little daunting due to the older language (e.g. connexion vs connection, lots of 'tis, 'tho', 'twill, lots of apostrophe-d) and some of his arguments are initially confusing (skip and come back later,) but it will give you a firm grounding on which to consider later philosophy (and much else besides.)

   After that, it won't matter too much which books you start with. If you're young, I'd recommend sticking to fiction for a while, pick up some of the old stuff (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante (Inferno,) Rabelais, Cervantes, etc.) Add some new stuff, too (Camus, Tagore, Yoshikawa, Flannery O'Connor, Colson Whitehead, Colum McCann, too many to name.) Once you start hitting thirty or so is when you might pick up some philosophy. The benefit of reading the old stuff first (e.g. Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's Symposium) is that later writers reference them. Even today, were you to read about, for example, the writing craft, teachers still quote Aristotle's Poetics (e.g. all stories have a beginning, middle and end.)

   As for personal philosophy, experience will shape you more, especially if/when you have kids, pay higher taxes, buy a house, suffer a sudden medical condition. But understanding the why of it--that's where the philosophers come in handy. Putting your human self--the same human self that is shared by humans from 5,000 years ago--in the context of humanity, of the human community.

   (P.S. As a bonus, if you're really itching for philosophy, try out Machiavelli's The Prince as translated by Tim Parks, or for just a little philosophy to start, Rashomon and 17 Other Stories by Akutagawa, esp. "Rashomon" and "In a Bamboo Grove". Another little bit of philosophy can be found in The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.)

   * edit--typos.

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