The insistence HNers have for utterly re-inventing their lives off of a single completely unsubstantiated book astounds me.

You know literally anyone can write literally anything in a book right? There's no vetting, no magical reality check. You can write a book that's nothing but good sounding falsehoods and nobody can stop you. You can even fill it with 10 pages of garbage, low quality citations!

The modern equivalent of a book is a 3 hour Youtube video essay, and most of them have more research behind them!

But nobody would obsess over them like people here obsess over lifestyle books.