5/14/2024
Context
I just returned from Colombia where. with my friends, we had organised a workshop for Canadians and Columbians together. We called in a Ciber-Village.
We had a very auto-poetic time. “” included friends Tommy Ayala, Riccardo Da Farra and recent friend Tomas Londono and other friends of our friends. We are incentivised to keep our collaborations going.
When i returned to Dallas I read my weekly issue of Science magazine and fell upon https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.adi5147 .
Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages Edoardo M. Airoldi1,2 and Nicholas A. Christakis3,4,5*.
Trust me as your friend, it is worth reading:
Certain people occupy topological positions within social networks that enhance their effectiveness at inducing spillovers. We mapped face-to-face networks among 24,702 people in 176 isolated villages in Honduras and randomly assigned villages to targeting methods, varying the fraction of households receiving a 22-month health education package and the method by which households were chosen (randomly versus using the friendship-nomination algorithm). We assessed 117 diverse knowledge, attitude, and practice outcomes. Friendship-nomination targeting reduced the number of households needed to attain specified levels of village-wide uptake. Knowledge spread more readily than behavior, and spillovers extended to two degrees of separation. Outcomes that were intrinsically easier to adopt also manifested greater spillovers. Network targeting using friendship nomination effectively promotes population-wide improvements in welfare through social contagion.
SO what ?: CSS Coincidence Serendipity and Synchronicity 101 is just Apophenia not Truth.
I belong to a group of friends: Robert Stern, geologist and, Fred Turner, poet and; we call our self the unfunded Emergence Center or Non-Center.
A synchronicity is that I read this article on the flight back from Colombia.
A serendipity is that it provide one framing concept for our workshop’s focus of “Ciber-Villages”. There is nothing new in the article, just a synchronicity that the authors studiend 26,000 villagers in Honduras, in the global south, like Bogota is.
Happenstance:
My good old friend Nina Czegledy was there, a Hungarian refugee from long ago. She is an educator and provocateuse. She and I are part of the PPP, Post Pandemic Provocateurs, which formed as a trio she and Joel Slayton and I. We have been meeting weekly.She is a long standing FOFOF. We unknowingly helped each other survice during the pandemic.
The article https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.adi5147 Studied the spread of good self health practices , and the fact now estanblished that spreading wisdom through FOF networks is more effective that trying to educate everyone top down.
By coincidence in the Ciber Village workshop
- Three students told us that during the pandemic they formed FOF group on whats app, and when one was sick the others went to do their shopping.
- One of the groups in the workshop discoursed on the need for non top down hierarchical teaching systems.
- PPP: Trust your friends not the paid teachers. You will learn more relevant knowledge that way. Standard curricula dont always make sense.
- We started creating a sonic portrait of the currently favorite songs of the workshop members, this band stand will soon be published in the global non-village.
Friendship Paradox:
I have been accused of ‘falling in love too easily’.
But “your lovers/friends have more friends than you do”
Disremembering:
With my e-friend Thom Kubli we have been writing endlessly about the idea of ‘dis-remembering’.
The idea arose during the pandemic that we tend to remember the least important things about a persons life, not the most impactful.
Larry Polansky died a few days ago, a former friend who became one of my best enemies because we picked someone else to be the editor in chief of the Leonardo Music Journal.
Gyorgy Kepes was a friend of my father’s ( we watched a film on Kepes made my Marton Orosz at the time of the workshop.
During the 1969 demonstrations against the Vietnam war, my father’s friend Kepes, provided a refuge for the student demonstrators when the violet police inrupted ( as colleagues have during the current Gaza wars
My friend Tom Linehan, who just died, ‘S good friend Rick Bretell told me something that us almost no information you can find on line about Kepes.
My father was born in Texas, Kepes lived in texas for two years teaching at the university of north texas. CSS.
He had to live on the ‘other side of the tracks’ with the black folk and the poor whites.
My father told me as a kid that he left Texas as soon as possible because of the ambient -isms ( he was of Bohemian descent and a nascent temporary communist)
Kepes then walked back across the tracks to teach and back again.
He had so much private secluded time that he had time to write a book that accelerated his career to MIT where I met him:
https://monoskop.org/images/a/af/Kepes_Gyorgy_Language_of_Vision.pdf Language of Vision.
Historians almost always only write about dead people. Our Emergence FOF learned this to our dismay when we generated hate mail about writing about some living people who contributed to the emergence of the Arts and Humanities in the University of Texas at Dallas.
Good friends matter but so do Good enemies. I often find myself reading up the ideas of people I usually disagree with. Maybe we can get a new study funded on the useful use of peoples best enemies. The Enemies Paradox ?