Author: stef

Traditional sources of meaning: faith, family, community, and the daily fight for survival have waned as secularism, individualism, capitalism and globalism have risen.   FARM can complement these relatively new and immature “isms” with wisdom from nature and our past to help fill the void generating alienation, nihilism, and ideological capture.

The industrial age gave us meaningless work: tedious, repetitive jobs, with micro-managing and monitoring to maximize efficiency while decreasing room for variety, autonomy, and creativity. The bright side/dark side of algorithms and robots taking much of that work from us is that many will likely be un(der)employed, perhaps paid by schemes like Universal Basic Income.…

Most recent populist backlashes (e.g. Brexit, Trump, Modi, Chavismo, neo-Peronism) against perceptions of elitism/globalism  can be addressed/minimized by one core FARM principle: “care” as a verb, not a feeling. That is, 1st distinguish between simply caring about (could be anything and nearly everything) versus what you actually do and can care for: that within your chosen fields…

Within the self-help genre–and its more scholarly brethren, like positive psychology–even the best advice, backed by research in the cognitive sciences, really starts as “me-search”. It’s based on what worked for the authors, so, it generally has limitations, such as conformation biases, baked in. FARM takes a different approach: 1) it integrates and synthesizes diverse…

It’s a noisy world out there. In our “Attention Economy”, the competition is fierce for our limited focus. FARM moves users from being informational hunter-gatherers, akin to our evolutionary ancestors’ foraging for food, to thinking and acting like farmers. At its core, agriculture is the deliberate tending (the root of “attention” and “intention”) of chosen…

Like all creatures, we conserve energy when we can. So we’ve long been attracted to magic and other promised short cuts. These days we know them as “one weird trick…” or lifehacks, but they’re the same beast. One way to spot them is that they’re usually isolated, reductive, and/or unconnected to a system or process. FARM…

Artificial Intelligence—and its components, machine learning and algorithms—have a big advantage over us: it has its purpose hardwired in already. We have to develop ours deliberately and slowly. AI might never exterminate us, but it’s already begun slowly enslaving us. A tempting taskmaster, as AI gives us what we want, it also redesigns what we…