SL Filho

This is the beginning of an insightful journey for you.

Revisado: 07-01-24

I’m a picky reader. I’m a well read academic and I despise shallow best-sellers, fads or those “one simple trick” books that so quickly rise to the top of the charts.

This book is different. It’s the work of a doctor in psychology, and a generous telling of how to deal with people who may love or have loved you, but didn’t know how — and ended up forging you into a frame you don’t deserve to be in.

With supreme clarity and elegantly simple, this is a book to cherish and re-listen in its bits and pieces over and over.

So glad I found you — recommended to me by ChatGPT as a serious book about emotions and healing.

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The 1st serious critique to woke culture

Revisado: 02-15-24

I’ve always seen myself as progressive, but I’ve taken issue with the exaggeration of today’s woke culture. I’ve looked for many authors that, right upfront, has provided poor argumentation against it — from flimsy to downright lazy or equivocal. Namely, Helen Pluckrose and Douglas Murray were big disappointments. Both, for instance, state that a number of sociologists are “incomprehensible”. Well, I have read them, and I could understand them. They are not easy reads but they are coherent in what they say, and there’s a reason they are a canon of philosophy and sociology, like Michel Foucault or Judith Butler. Mounk gives comprehensive overviews of works of these philosophers, and very aptly makes a key differentiation: the problem is a lot with their readers, not their texts.
This is one example on what the book does right, and there are more.
The thesis is one of integration of races, and less centricity around identity. But this not a denial, like many right wing writers advocate. Mounk asks for a recognition of the complexity of identity, and I agree there is this need.
He does not provide many solutions, and his “six steps” are more rhetorical tricks than real convincing argumentations. But it’s refreshing. Nobody can stand anymore to be canceled, banned or silenced for disagreeing. This is an important discussion.

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Makes a few good points, but ends up a caricature

Revisado: 01-21-24

I’m just reading Madness of Crowds and there are some great passages… but also pretty stupid, baseless things.

For example, he has well documented and exposed cases of contradictions with the scholar hoax, the sexual harassment case at Harvard and others.

He also has good points in the first chapter, “gay”. The chapter about women has very stupid arguments. “A woman can be sexual, but not sexualized”, like saying women who seduce or dress skimpy are “asking for it”. I’d think consent is a necessary requirement, universally accepted as such.

I thought so far the most laughable part in this chapter is when he says that “women has power, an exclusive power to seduce and destroy men”. Lmao this sounds exactly like a Saudi Arabian fundamentalist advising married guys to stay away from sin.

It’s a pity that the voice raised against the exaggerations of woke culture is also a caricature.

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A dumb book for people feel smart

Revisado: 12-07-21

There is one central idea that is hardly explored — antifragile systems that get stronger with shock. But the writing reeks old, moralising, patronising half-baked ideas. There are some of the most absurd and incoherent use of anecdotes I’ve ever read. One of those authors who try to apply an old saying to any situation in life; one of those authors that leave the theory to become a “life advisor”; one of those authors who are lazy and inconsistent with references or theory or samples or data. It’s so disconnected from our time that he needs to make eulogies to entrepreneurs because they don’t get praise enough (O’RLY? Silicon Valley, anyone?). He even gets it plain wrong who the author of the selfish gene theory is (it’s Richard Dawkins, not the dude he cites). It’s a mess. He probably wrote it in a hurry, with very little revision and convinced it’s a masterpiece. It’s not. No real editor could have read that and think it’s passable. It’s not. It’s a bad, fast, airport-like book, written by someone desperate to be consider an intellectual. He’s not. It’s a dumb book for people to feel smart.

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Get someone else to read this?

Revisado: 11-22-21

This book is important, inspiring, informative and well-backed by research. Fukuyama is an important voice.

But the voice actor makes it an excruciating experience. He does not have a clue of what he’s reading. The sentences are all read separately, like disconnected commercial shoutouts.
Please, re-record this. We pay Audible for quality content, or else I could get my own recordings uploaded for cash.

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Shortsighted, even if addresses real problems

Revisado: 10-31-21

Here’s the problem with Ms. Pluckrose: a very basic misunderstanding of the role of postmodernist thinking, due to her literal interpretation of their texts. Postmodernists like Foucault or Deleuze never thought that “diseases are a social construct” in the biological sense. Obviously! What they meant, by using figures of speech all the way, is that the popular CATEGORIZATION and perception of certain diseases end up working as social constructs. For example, “malaria is a disease of poor people”.
Postmodernism never questioned that science (biology, physics) should be SUBSTITUTED by social science. But rather that the phenomena studied by biology is not only biological. Hence, there is no “Truth”. This is another figure of speech of those french intellectuals: “there’s no absolute Truth”. They are NOT saying that a scientist cannot know how to cure a disease. It also doesn’t mean that, for instance, a criminal rate report from a small Caribbean island cannot be reliable. They mean that these phenomena should not be evaluated ONLY by the quantitative sense, because they are more complex phenomena. For instance: a disease may create panic, raise superstition, political divides. Finding a cure is not the only thing at stake to explain the disease. Similarly, explaining violence by number of guns purchased and shots fired does not explain everything. Culture, poverty, individual motivation, etc all play a role in creating violence.
This is so… basic that it’s cringeworthy to spell it out. But most of the panic Ms. Pluckrose is spreading could have been avoided by, well, understanding what they meant.
They never meant social sciences should substitute hard sciences, but rather be considered as a different angle to explain similar phenomena.
That’s not to say that there is not a problem in academia today. There is. Identity politics is suffering from a lack of rigor, and is dividing people and creating serious trouble at times.
But none of that justify the short sight with which the author examines the original texts of postmodernism.

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A gem

Revisado: 08-01-21

I have an MA and a PhD in contemporary culture, and I’ve published novels and short stories. I’ve read several books on style and literary theory — and yet, this book is a really good read for a fiction writer. It’s solid theory, classically referenced and in direct, to-the-point insights. A round of applause also goes to the voice actor — smooth, firm and very memorable voice. This is a gem!

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