chemical modelling, an indispensable tool in everyday chemistry research, we introduce a transferability assessment tool (TAT) and demonstrate it on a controllable data-driven model for developing density functional approximations (DFAs). We reveal that human intuition in the curation of training data introduces chemical biases that can hamper the transferability of data-driven DFAs. We use our TAT to motivate three transferability principles; one of which introduces the key concept of transferable diversity. Finally, we propose data curation strategies for general-purpose machine learning models in chemistry that identify and embed the transferability principles.