CONCEPT
Think Little
Berry's 1972 counter-proposal to comprehensive planning: the most important work is <em>small</em> work—specific, local, at the scale where consequences are observable and care is possible.
Wendell Berry's discipline of attention, proposed in 1972 as an alternative to the grand plans and systems-level interventions that characterize industrial problem-solving. "Think little" means working at the scale where you can observe the consequences of your actions, adjust in response to what you learn, and maintain the relationship between your intervention and the system. For a farmer, this is the scale of a field. For a teacher, the scale of a classroom. For a parent, the scale of a family. The scale at which care is possible—not abstract policy-level care but specific, daily, embodied care that makes the difference between tended and mined domains. Berry argues that thinking big—the industrial economy's signature cognitive style—produces abstraction that replaces ground-level attention, models that replace the territory, strategists who have never walked a field deciding what should grow there. Applied to AI, "think little" means resisting the tool's gravitational pull toward universal solutions and asking instead: What is the specific problem, in this specific place, for these specific people? The answer will differ in