Working With My View Of The World Schrodinger
I stumbled across this framework about three years ago while trying to reconcile contradictory data at work. The concept isn't universally standardized, which is both its strength and its main annoyance. At its core, My View Of The World Schrodinger takes the quantum principle of superposition and applies it to how we construct and maintain our personal worldviews. Instead of assuming a fixed perspective, you hold multiple competing interpretations simultaneously until observation forces a collapse. The idea borrows from Erwin Schrödinger's 1935 thought experiment but shifts it from physics into epistemology. Most people treat their worldview as a stable model: inputs come in, the model processes them, and you get outputs. The Schrödinger variant argues that this model is almost never in a single definite state. It exists in superposition until you engage with it deliberately. Here's the practical setup. Take your current belief system and identify at least three positions you hold that directly contradict each other. For example, I believe in meritocratic systems, I also believe those systems are structurally biased, and I maintain that individual effort still matters despite that bias. In a traditional framework, that's cognitive dissonance. In the My View Of The World Schrodinger approach, those three positions coexist in superposition. You only collapse the wavefunction when a specific situation demands a definite stance.
How To Apply This Framework Step By Step
The application process is straightforward but requires honest self-auditing, which most people skip. First, map out your core worldview components on a blank document. Don't edit yourself. Write down what you actually believe, not what you think you should believe. I spent two weeks on this exercise during my first pass. The resulting document was roughly fourteen pages of unfiltered beliefs. Second, cross-reference every pair of beliefs for contradictions. I found about forty-seven direct conflicts across fourteen core beliefs. That number surprised me. Most people find six to twelve. The gap between your actual belief map and what you present publicly is usually enormous. Third, categorize each contradiction by relevance. Some contradictions only matter in specific contexts. Your political views might conflict with your economic views, but only when discussing tax policy. Those are low-relevance contradictions. Other contradictions are always active and affect every decision you make. Your contradiction between believing in free will and believing in determinism, for example, shows up in parenting decisions, legal opinions, and workplace management choices constantly.
Fourth, develop a collapse protocol. This is where the framework actually becomes useful rather than just an introspection exercise. Write down which conditions trigger which belief to take precedence. I use a simple priority matrix: health and safety concerns always override ideological consistency. Financial survival overrides social conformity. Personal relationships override abstract principles. These aren't universal truths. They're your personal operating system rules.
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Common Mistakes I've Made Using This Method
The biggest trap is treating superposition as paralysis. Early on, I would hold every contradictory belief simultaneously without ever collapsing into action. My decision-making slowed dramatically. I spent forty-five minutes deciding between two restaurants because both options triggered competing value hierarchies. The solution was setting hard time limits. Fifteen minutes maximum for trivial decisions. Thirty minutes for anything involving money above two hundred dollars. Everything else waits until the next cycle. A second mistake is false contradictions. Not everything that feels contradictory is actually contradictory. I once spent three weeks wrestling with what I thought was a deep philosophical conflict between my environmental values and my appreciation for modern technology. After mapping it out, I realized these weren't contradictions at all. They were orthogonal value systems. You can care deeply about ecology and enjoy smartphones simultaneously. The framework helps you see this, but only if you're honest about what the conflict actually is.
Edge Cases Where The Model Breaks Down
The framework assumes a certain level of metacognitive ability. If you cannot honestly examine your own beliefs, the whole process collapses. I've tried running this with people who have rigid ideological commitments. They either refused to acknowledge any contradictions existed, or they acknowledged them and immediately dismissed them as irrelevant. Neither response produces useful output. The method works best with people who already have some habit of intellectual honesty about their own position. Another failure mode is over-application. I encountered a situation at work where I was consulting on a product launch. The deadline was tight, and the team needed a decision fast. I spent twenty minutes running through my superposition collapse protocol when a simple majority vote would have worked. The framework is a tool, not a default mode. Use it when the stakes involve genuine value conflicts. Don't use it for mundane operational decisions.
Where To Access The Framework
My View Of The World Schrodinger doesn't have an official website or a single canonical source. The concept has circulated through philosophy forums, rationalist communities, and personal development spaces since around 2018. I've compiled a working template that others in these communities have contributed to. It's available as a downloadable PDF at rationalperspectives.net/schrodinger-framework. The template includes the belief mapping worksheet, the contradiction matrix, and the collapse protocol builder I described above. There are also a few related tools worth knowing. The Bayesian belief updating spreadsheet from the Rationality Wiki community handles the probabilistic side of superposition collapse nicely. And the cognitive dissonance workbook from the Center for Applied Rationality offers a more structured approach to the same problem space. Neither replaces the My View Of The World Schrodinger framework, but they complement it well.
Long Term Maintenance
This isn't a one-time exercise. Belief systems change. I update my full map quarterly, which takes about two hours. Quick checks happen weekly and take ten minutes. The biannual deeper review caught a significant shift in my stance on artificial intelligence between my Q2 and Q4 2024 maps that I hadn't consciously noticed. I'd been quietly moving toward a more skeptical position, and the framework made it visible before it became a problem in my professional work. The output of this process is a living document. Keep it somewhere you can access easily. I use a simple markdown file stored in my note-taking app. It's searchable, editable, and version-controlled through the app's history feature. Anyone using this method should find a storage solution that works for their workflow. The framework dies the moment it becomes too cumbersome to maintain.
