Worldview: Awareness
Understand what worldview means, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Your worldview – the collection of mental models, beliefs, and frameworks you use to interpret what happens around you – shapes nearly every significant decision you make. It determines which opportunities you notice, which risks you take seriously, and how well you predict what comes next.
Research on superforecasting found that the best predictors share a common trait: they draw on broad, well-integrated knowledge rather than deep expertise in a single domain. People with well-developed worldviews were roughly 30% more accurate at predicting geopolitical and economic events than intelligence analysts with access to classified information.
The practical consequences are substantial. Understanding basic economics helps you evaluate career decisions and financial choices. Knowing how political systems function lets you anticipate policy changes that affect your life. Familiarity with psychology helps you recognise when you are being manipulated – or when you are fooling yourself. A 2012 study found that people with greater knowledge of how the world works were significantly less susceptible to conspiracy theories and misinformation.
Perhaps most importantly, a coherent worldview provides psychological grounding. People with well-examined beliefs about human nature, progress, and their place in the broader story tend to cope better with uncertainty and report greater life satisfaction. Your worldview is not just an intellectual exercise – it is the operating system your mind runs on.
People develop their worldviews for different reasons. This site scores every worldview intervention across four core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these four values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Breadth
Developing understanding across multiple domains that shape how the world works – history, economics, psychology, politics, culture, and technology. People who lean towards this value focus on seeing connections between different fields and avoiding the blind spots that come from narrow knowledge. They tend to favour comprehensive coverage over deep specialisation.
Depth
Building sophisticated, nuanced understanding within specific domains rather than surface-level familiarity. People who lean towards this value focus on mastering fewer areas thoroughly, understanding complex theories, and analysing subtle distinctions. They would rather know two subjects well enough to teach them than know ten subjects well enough to discuss them at a dinner party.
Utility
A worldview that enhances real-world decision-making, prediction, and practical navigation of complex situations. People who lean towards this value focus on understanding how systems actually work – not how they are supposed to work – and they tend to prioritise frameworks that improve their ability to achieve goals and avoid common mistakes.
Meaning
Developing understanding that provides psychological grounding, moral framework, and sense of purpose. People who lean towards this value focus on building coherent narratives about human nature, progress, and their place in the larger story. They want a worldview that offers stability and direction during uncertainty, not just analytical power.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each worldview value:
Vaclav Smil has published over 40 books spanning energy, food production, environmental change, economics, demographics, and technical innovation. His writing regularly integrates data from half a dozen disciplines in a single argument. Bill Gates has called him his favourite author, largely because Smil's analyses draw on a range of domains that few specialists can match. He holds no public office and runs no institute – the breadth of his published work is itself the evidence.
David Deutsch is a physicist at Oxford who developed the quantum theory of computation and has written two books – The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity – that attempt to unify physics, epistemology, evolution, and computation into a single explanatory framework. His work demonstrates an unusual depth of engagement with fundamental questions across multiple disciplines, sustained over several decades.
Philip Tetlock spent over 20 years tracking the accuracy of expert predictions and demonstrated that most experts performed barely better than chance. He then developed the Good Judgment Project, which identified ordinary people whose forecasting accuracy consistently exceeded that of intelligence analysts. His work on superforecasting has been adopted by intelligence agencies and investment firms as a practical framework for decision-making under uncertainty.
Wendell Berry has spent over 60 years farming, writing, and teaching from the same small farm in Henry County, Kentucky. His novels, essays, and poetry articulate a worldview built around land stewardship, community, and the limits of industrial progress – and he has lived according to those principles consistently, farming without a tractor for decades and refusing to own a computer. His worldview appears to be genuinely load-bearing in his daily decisions rather than a theoretical position.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to think through.
Breadth
Depth
Utility
Meaning
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published data on knowledge breadth, critical thinking, prediction accuracy, and meaning-making. All items in this area are scored.
You now understand why worldview matters, what different people get out of developing theirs, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about breadth, depth, utility, and meaning. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Worldview. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
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