FERN
About
Fern shows you how you and the people you know are actually different.
Not a verdict on anybody. Twenty either/or choices put you somewhere on four axes, and the interesting part is what happens when you hold that next to somebody else's.
Our goal
To help people better understand each other, and hopefully bring them together.
How it works
Do the sort
Twenty either/or choices, about two minutes. No AI involved in it, no account, and nothing saved to a server.
Send it to someone
Your result travels in the link itself. They do their own, and both of you see where you line up and where you part.
Or start a group
Up to ten people on one link. A group shows how many lean each way — and where you are split down the middle, which is usually where the same argument keeps coming back.
Who is Sage
Sage is the one you talk to. She reads a result back to you, or a comparison, and she will go as deep as you want — ask her what any of it means and she answers properly. She is not a chatbot that agrees with you: she takes the lead, asks the uncomfortable question, and says when you are dodging.
You never have to use her. The sort, the sharing and the groups all work without saying a word to anyone.
Does it work?
Honestly: not proven, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A clinical psychologist has read the twenty items and thought they held up. Nothing here has been through a validation study, and expert review is not the same thing.
Which is why you are shown a position on each axis rather than a verdict, and why the letter closest to the middle is named as the one most likely to come out differently another day.
Is it safe?
Where does what I say go?
It stays on your device. Your results, the people you have compared with and your conversations are all in this browser, not on a server — which is also why they do not follow you to another phone, and why clearing site data clears them.
Shared results travel in the link and nowhere else. There is no row anywhere pairing two people, and nothing to delete afterwards. The flip side, said plainly: whoever holds a link can see what is in it, so a group link shows everybody in that group.
If you have more questions… why not just ask her:
Where this came from
The typology is Jung’s, from Psychological Types in 1921. Myers and Briggs popularised it decades later and turned it into a test. Underneath Fern there is a larger research project about the Hero’s Journey and the twelve archetypes, which is where Sage comes from and where this is going next.
- I
You talk. She pushes back.
Not a chatbot that agrees with you. Sage takes the lead, asks the uncomfortable question, and says when you are dodging.
- II
Eighteen picks place you somewhere real.
No AI in that part at all — just your own forced choices, scored the way psychometrics has scored paired comparisons for decades.
- III
Then the reading gets specific.
Your words are measured against the twelve Jungian archetypes and you get a position, not a label. Whether that position means anything is the open question — and the one worth answering.
No more talk — hit the link and start the journey.
(to be honest, we don’t know where this will go)
Start with SageHow the reading is actually made
Most things that tell you about yourself are matching keywords, or asking you and handing it back. This does something you can check.
You write a sentence
Anything real — what happened today, what you keep circling back to.
It becomes a point in space
The sentence is turned into a list of 1,024 numbers. Sentences that mean similar things land near each other, whatever words they used.
Twelve archetypes are already in that space
Each of Jung's twelve has its own position, built the same way from its own description. Yours lands somewhere among them.
The nearest one is your reading
Not a keyword match and not a guess — a distance, measured. That is the whole mechanism.
The honest limitation, said here rather than buried: the mechanism is real and standard, but the twelve descriptions it measures against are written by us. A clinical psychologist has read the type-sort questions and thought they held up; nothing here has been through a formal validation study. So the distance is a fact, and what the category means is still a hypothesis.
Three solids
Your journey is modelled as three shapes, one per stage, with four archetypes at the corners of each. You are never on a corner — you sit somewhere inside, pulled toward whichever corners your answers lean to.
You do not need the maths, and none of it is ours: paired-comparison scoring from psychometrics, embeddings and kernel similarity from machine learning. Old, standard, well-understood methods.
What is new is what we point them at. Personality tools ask you questions and hand back a label. This measures ordinary language against the twelve archetypes and reports a position rather than a box — so it can say how strongly you sit somewhere, and change as you talk. Whether that position means anything is the open question, and the one we are actually testing.
Building the three solids…
She will push you
Sage is built to guide you out of your comfort zone, because that is where we think real change happens. She will disagree with you when it is warranted, and say so when you are dodging something. If that is too much — or not enough — there is a dial for it in settings.
I’m fine, honestly. It’s just been a busy week.
That’s the third busy week you’ve mentioned. Busy is doing a lot of work in that sentence — what is it standing in for?
Illustrative, not a real conversation — yours stay on your device.
Built by Tom.S and his daughters — who have broken two of the computers it was written on, and who are its most demanding testers.
Fern is new and being shown to people for the first time. If something is wrong, unclear, or worth saying — hello@fernsocial.io.
Nothing you do in Fern reaches a server, so there is no account to close and no copy of your data to ask for. Clearing this browser removes all of it.