From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl@gate.kl-ic.com> To: klofstrom@gmail.com Cc: Bcc: keithl@gate Subject: Gellner, Fútbol literacy Reply-To: keithl@keithl.com

Some Gellner and some engineering "anthropology":

I won't have time for a cover-to-cover read, but I checked out "Words and Things"(1959) by Ernest Gellner from the PSU library. Gellner was rankled by Wittgenstein - who I know little about, but a frenemy is a Princeton-trained Wittgenstein scholar and a real asshole, so I am interested ...

I found this pleasingly snarky passage on page 232:

" So far, in talking of "ideology", I have in effect been defining my use of the term. I now wish to specify some important characteristics which are, I think, often displayed by successful ideologies:

points which gives it a compulsiveness of a kind.

generating offensiveness at some one or more other points.

The first of these is a kind of bait. An appealing outlook must somehow account for some striking features of our experience which otherwise remain unaccounted for, or are otherwise less well explained. The second feature, though initially repellent, is what binds the group, what singles out the cluster of ideas from the general realm of true ideas. The swallowing of an absurdity is, in the acceptance of an ideology, what a painful /rite de passage/ is in joining a tribal group -- the act of commitment, the investment of emotional capital which ensures that one does not leave it too easily. The intellectually offensive characteristics may even be objectively valid; it is only essential that, at the beginning, and perhaps in some measure always, they should be difficult to accept. "

Now THAT explains a lot. The gostak distims the doshes!

Subject two, idea inspired by an amateur anthropological interview of Guatemalan friend Mertala Rado:

Fútbol literacy - using the passion for fútbol (soccer) and cricket, plus server sky computation-enabled individualization, to teach hundreds of millions of older adults to read.

Sesame Street worked for millions of US children, and that was a "one size fits all" product. Think of how much more effective an individualized, progress-aware system could be.

If every adult watching a game was gradually introduced to written words as part of commentary, score, player history, etc., they would develop a strong desire to learn more. If each individual had a "digital teacher", software that kept track of their progress and introduced new words and concepts when the fútbol fan was ready and eager to learn them, think of how fast and how well the "fan pupils" could learn.

Combined with a facebook-style "individual network" graph, the words introduced could be synchronized with the words friends are learning - social impetus to enjoy learning together.

This could also be used for language learning - especially if the games were transnational, say between Guatemala (spanish) and Kenya (english). Guatemala especially - with so many Mayan languages in such a small place, this could bring all the inditos in the country into the international Spanish-speaking world.

Keith

PS: I am told "inditos"/indian/indigene is no longer politically correct, which is progress of a sort. I fear verbiage like "Spanish-challenged" is probably in vogue, though a neologism that clumsy makes me nauseous. :-/

-- Keith Lofstrom keithl@keithl.com