Aurignacian marks dated between 43,000-34,000 years ago
Image Source: New Discovery of World's Oldest Writing Rewrites Human History, at 1:30
Introducing IdeaFarm (tm) Knowledge Trees, and IdeaNet (tm) Books by IdeaFarm (tm)
Unlike most content on today's Internet, this page is not presented to entertain you with click-bait to generate advertising revenue. I am much older now, in 2026, than I was in those videos. The first 30 seconds of the first video reveals the mission and vision that motivated a high risk, ambitious 35 year software craftwork project. That craftwork was successful, so I am now ready to present what I have built for the benefit of all young people, worldwide.
This presentation is plain text, partly because I am "old school", but also partly because written composition is sometimes optimal. It's not a "rabbit hole"; eight clicks and about twenty minutes of thoughtful reading will get you to the treasure, and you will spend another twenty minutes enjoying it.
Only 13% of IDEAFARM.COM's target audience can read and comprehend the current presentation. When asked, "What percentage of adults age 20 to 29 regularly read English composition comparable to book length nonfiction, essays, or legal opinions?", an AI responded, in part, "... roughly 13% to 16% of young adults regularly engage with this depth of complex text.". When then asked, "What percentage of adults aged 20 to 29 could read and comprehend http://root.ideafarm.com if they were highly motivated to make the effort?", the AI responded, in part, "... 13% of adults aged 20 to 29 have the foundational capacity to read and fully comprehend root.ideafarm.com, even when factoring in high motivation.".
The presentation on IDEAFARM.COM is intended to do more than communicate ideas; it is also intended to awaken and inspire the reader to both personal and collective action. Prose text is not just a form of communication. It is a form of thinking, of guided thinking, for the writer as well as for the reader. Although guided thinking can be accomplished with other communication forms, generally speaking, prose text is is the most powerful form for guided thinking. That is why literacy is so important, both for the person and for the community and nation. Illiteracy, the inability to participate in the process of guided thinking using prose text, is intellectual blindness. Like a blind person attempting to cross a busy street, an illiterate person is in great peril, groping in darkness while attempting to navigate life.
IDEAFARM.COM will soon be completely rewritten to focus on the problem of illiteracy. The objective of awakening and inspiring the reader to action will not change. But this will be accomplished as a byproduct of converting IDEAFARM.COM into a website focused on promoting literacy.
IDEAFARM.COM will address literacy by introducing a fundamentally new form of writing, the "knowledge tree", that makes both writing and reading much easier and much more effective. Humans have been using sequences of symbols to represent information for 40,000 years, and to represent speech for 5,000 years. Although the variety of applications of this technique has exploded, the technique itself, stringing symbols together in a "linear" sequence, has not changed in 40,000 years. Until now. In a knowledge tree, each idea is expressed in the conventional way, as a linear sequence of symbols (a sentence). But rather than presenting ideas in a linear sequence, a knowledge tree arranges ideas in a tree structure.
Reading a knowledge tree is like climbing a tree. With conventional linear writing, the reader encounters each idea (sentence) sequentially, from beginning to end. With a knowledge tree, the reader encounters the single "root" idea (branch) that summarizes the entire writing. He or she then "climbs up" a level and encounters a (linear) sequence of about eight ideas (branches) that, together, explain the meaning of the root idea. Each of those approximately eight ideas (branches) can have about eight branches growing upward. There is no limit to the number of levels of detail, and branches can have a varying number of levels of detail. Rather than reading the entire tree, the reader actively decides how far up to explore each idea (branch).
The key benefit for the reader of presenting ideas in this way is that complexity is broken down into simple, digestible, small pieces. As the reader explores any branch in the tree, he or she is only digesting a single idea by reading a single sequence of about eight explanatory ideas. (Visually, the presentation is a single paragraph of sentences, beginning with the sentence being explained.)
The key benefit for the writer is that he or she can write for multiple audiences with varying interests and reading skills simultaneously. With conventional writing, the author must select a target audience and then let that choice guide the level of detail with which to explain each idea. But when writing a knowledge tree, all detail is provided, and each reader chooses how far to climb up into the tree to explore each idea. To maximize accessibility, the author can express each idea in the lower levels of the tree using simple, common words, while exploiting the full power and vocabulary of the English language in the higher levels. In this way, the writing is accessible to persons with limited vocabulary and reading skill, while also satisfying the more demanding requirements of other audiences.
Knowledge tree writing imposes structure, which both empowers and restricts the writer. Conventional writing is "free form" in that any sentence in a paragraph can be the topic sentence, paragraphs can be presented in any order, and the topic of each paragraph is unconstrained by the topics of the other paragraphs nearby. In a knowledge tree, each paragraph always begins with its topic sentence, and that topic sentence (branch) must directly explain the branch "below" from which it grows. Conventional writing can ramble and meander or even be insanely incoherent in the sequence of ideas presented. With a knowledge tree, the writer begins with an arbitrary "root" idea, but all of the other ideas in the writing must be arranged in small sequences that explain some other idea in the tree.
Finally, knowledge tree writing can be either "pure" or "hybrid". A pure knowledge tree conforms to the imposed structure throughout. But nothing prevents the author from explaining a particular branch with a linear sequence of free form ideas (conventional writing). For example, a single knowledge tree can include multiple conventional essays within a structure that thus partially, but not completely, conforms to the structure of a pure knowledge tree.
If you are one of the 13% of adults aged 20-29 who are functionally literate, you will likely not struggle to comprehend the current presentation, which uses conventional "linear" writing. If you are in the other 87%, you can either give it a try and see how far you get, or just wait for IDEAFARM.COM to be redesigned. Start by clicking [8] this sentence, and give yourself time for thoughtful reading at a leisurely pace.