Assessing Marital Compatibility and Much Bigger Things

The “Quick Worldview Analysis” program, now freely available at www.projectworldview.org, might be of immediate interest to those contemplating marriage. The program gauges how compatible your beliefs, values and overall worldview is with another person’s. While the output is easy to understand—a single % correlation number that can range from –100 % to + 100%--and actually running the program takes a scant ten minutes to input two groups of twenty seven numbers, assembling good input data takes time. It involves two people independently familiarizing themselves with eighty worldview themes fully described on the website, picking out twenty seven they especially like or dislike, and assigning them non-zero scores ranging from +5 to –5. “I’d give that at least one hour,” says Project Worldview founder Stephen Cook, pointing out that “Garbage In = Garbage Out!” is not something on which one wants to base a marriage!

Actually Project Worldview is not in the assessing marital compatibility business at all. Its roots can be traced to a 1980s collaboration between Cook and Donella Meadows, an author of the book The Limits to Growth, based on a (what became very controversial) MIT / Club of Rome study. Long intrigued by the promise of using computer-based systems techniques to construct useful world models, Cook likes to imagine his many years of work building a structure to characterize and quantitatively analyze worldviews as eventually contributing to such modeling efforts. His latest post, “Worldview Analysis, World Models, and Predicting the Future,” on the Project Worldview website’s Worldview Watch blog, discusses the human behavior related difficulties involved.

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