Every morning
The question of the day
Everyone gets the same one.
A new edition every morning
Five cards a day.
A little sharper.
Every morning, five cards: facts worth keeping and questions that test your judgment. Answer, say how sure you are, and watch your confidence get honest.
- 5cards a day
- 2minutes
- 19subjects
- 13languages
Today’s question
Answer it in Astute →Everyone gets the same question, every morning. Say how sure you are, then see who was right.
How a day works
Five cards a day, two minutes.
A new edition every morning. This is the shape of one.
Your mix
Four more, chosen for you
Your subjects, your level, never one you've read.
Your call
Say how sure you are
It matters more than being right.
The reveal
Flip it
The answer, one line to repeat tonight, and the source.
The streak
Come back tomorrow
A streak, with freezes for the evening you forget.
Calibration
Say how sure you are.
Astute doesn't reward being right. It rewards knowing how likely you are to be right.
Every answer carries a number: 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90 per cent sure. Over the weeks, Astute plots how often you were right at each. Drag to read a typical first month.
How sure are you?
You said 70%.
You were right 63% of the time. 7 points overconfident.
Principles, not trivia
What you got wrong comes back — somewhere new.
One card teaches a card. A principle teaches everything it touches.
Miss the base rate in a clinic and, weeks later, it comes back in a crowd. Tap a card to flip it.
One principle Base rates
Medicine
A test for a rare disease is 99% accurate. You test positive. How likely is it that you're ill?
Tap to flip
Medicine
A test for a rare disease is 99% accurate. You test positive. How likely is it that you're ill?
About 9%. If one person in a thousand has the disease, the test finds them — and flags about ten healthy people alongside. Most positives are false ones.
Bar move
Before you trust a positive, ask how rare the thing is.
Technology
Face recognition is 99% accurate. It flags a face in a crowd of 100,000. How likely is it that they're on the watchlist?
Tap to flip
Technology
Face recognition is 99% accurate. It flags a face in a crowd of 100,000. How likely is it that they're on the watchlist?
About 1%. If ten people in that crowd are on the list, the system finds them — and a thousand who aren't. Same maths, different world.
Bar move
Ninety-nine per cent accurate can still be wrong almost every time.
Subjects
Nineteen subjects.
Every card, chosen for you.
- Economics
- Sport
- Nature
- Science
- Language
- Technology
- Space
- Philosophy
- Cinema
- Psychology
- Music
- Weird facts
- Art
- Pop culture
- Human body
- Medicine
- Food
- History
- Thinking
Inside
The whole app, in five screens.
Today’s five, the answer behind each card, the day done, a shelf to explore, and your record.
Widgets
On your home screen.
Today's card on your home screen. Your streak on your lock screen. Today's five, and how far you are.
The science
What the evidence says.
-
You can't train general intelligence.
Simons et al., 2016 -
You can train away specific biases, and it transfers.
Morewedge et al., 2015Sellier, Scopelliti & Morewedge, 2019 -
You can train calibration.
Mellers et al., Good Judgment Project — about 10% better forecasts
So Astute doesn't promise a bigger brain. It trains the three things that move.
Friends
Compare how honest you are, not how much you read.
Add friends with a code. The board sorts by calibration, so the person who knows what they know sits on top, whatever their streak.
Your friend codeASTU-7HD3
NameStreakWeeksCalibration
1LLéa3114+1
2YYou126−3
3TTomás42−9
Calibration is the gap between how sure you said you were and how often you were right, in points. Closer to zero is better. An example board.
Pricing
Make all five yours.
Astute is free every morning. Astute+ chooses every card for you.
Free
€0every morning
- The question of the day
- The edition's cards
- One card of your own each day
- A week of archive
Astute+7 days free
- All five cards chosen for you
- Your journey, subject by subject
- Your whole archive
Cancel any time, in the App Store or Google Play
Prices in euros; the App Store and Google Play show yours.
FAQ
Questions.
Yes. Every morning you get the question of the day, the edition’s cards and one card of your own, with a week of archive. Astute+ makes all five cards yours.
Astute+ yearly starts with seven days free. Nothing is charged until the eighth day. Cancel before then and you pay nothing: on iPhone in Settings → Apple Account → Subscriptions, on Android in Google Play → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions. Cancel later and you keep Astute+ until the period ends.
Thirteen: English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Russian. Astute follows your phone’s language.
No. Astute starts anonymous. Sign in with Apple or Google when you want to keep your record on a new phone.
No ads, nothing sold. The details are in our privacy policy.
In the app: Profile → Delete account.
Yes. Astute is on Google Play and the App Store, with the same cards every morning.
Still have a question?Write to thebalecompany@gmail.com. We answer within two working days.
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