adam_bly's comments

Important question.

Here's our launch announcement with the full answer: https://about.system.com/blog/announcing-the-public-beta-of-...

TL;DR Because the biggest challenges we face in the world — from COVID to climate change — are systemic, yet our data and knowledge are organized into silos. I believe this fundamental incongruity makes it impossible to think, plan, and act systemically. As a result, we are stifled in our ability to reliably predict outcomes, make decisions, mitigate risks, and improve the state of the world for everyone.

So, we built System. A new way to organize data and knowledge into systems based on the evolving relationships between everything in the world. A shared tool for systems thinking — and, we hope, a springboard for collective action.

We share much in common with Wikipedia, are deeply inspired by what it does for the world, and hope to be used alongside Wikipedia. Our openness and CC license, our use of Wikidata as the source of definitions, for example, are common. But System aims to explain how anything in the world relates to everything else — based on statistical evidence. It is not an encyclopedia.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

Hopefully the welcome screen (post video) more clearly spelled out the product purpose. You can also read our full product guide here ICYI ("Using System"): https://docs.system.com/system/

As a Public Benefit Corporation, the societal context we explore in the video is the purpose behind System. ICYI, you can read our purpose here (https://about.system.com/company/our-purpose), our legal charter here (https://about.system.com/company/our-charter), and our launch announcement here (https://about.system.com/blog/announcing-the-public-beta-of-...).

Thank you so much! We really appreciate it.

We obtained the domain from a company that was using it for a very different purpose. They appreciated our mission and we arrived at a reasonable price. And we're grateful to them.

Thank you so much. We'd love for you to join our Slack community (link on system.com).

Great question. There is no ground truth that we are modeling System after, i.e. there is no causal model of the world out there (to use Pearl's framing). So I'm not sure we can know how far along we are epistemologically. More practically, for the next few years we have plenty of work to just represent all the existing corpuses of scholarship! The truer and arguably more meaningful test of progress though is how decisions are improved — for users, for organizations — that use System.

Quality is evaluated and presented using a variety of parameters like strength, significance, and reproducibility (full documentation here: https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/investigating-re...).

Re completeness, as I wrote below, System Search results are not necessarily comprehensive — but they will be. System is in the early stages of its development as a public resource and you should expect that knowledge will be missing. The knowledge base will be constantly growing and improving and evolving as knowledge does. Our community will play an important role in relating what we expect or know should be related.

Hmm. A System Search for "unemployment" shows you how unemployment is (importantly) related to crime, health, substance abuse, and suicide.

https://www.system.com/view/topic/lBZj8Zxk60L?view_context=g...

https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/finding-and-expl...

What are you seeing?

There is great work out there that mines Wikipedia for semantic relationship (co-occurrence of topics for example, parent-child relationships, etc.). But that methodology would not provide the statistical evidence that is the building block of System. Relationships on System are statistical in nature. A predicts B, C is caused by D, E and F are highly correlated, G and H change together, etc. By organizing these (billions and billions of) statistical relationships, anyone will be able see anything that's important to them as the system it truly is, rather than the silo we often see today.

Search results are not necessarily comprehensive — but they will be. System is in the early stages of its development as a public resource and you should expect that knowledge will be missing (just like the early days of Wikipedia and Google). The knowledge base will also be constantly growing and improving and evolving as knowledge does. ICYI, you can join our slack community to discuss this work further (the link is on system.com).

Our technical documentation details what constitutes a node and edge ICYI: https://docs.system.com/system/

In brief, System is designed to maximize precision in how evidence is captured and represented, while also ensuring that information about the same or similar things is grouped together. This is key to building and representing one system. This translates into three types of nodes of increasing specificity: Topics, Metrics, and Features. More here: https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/topics-metrics-a....

Edges are statistical relationships backed by statistical evidence that meets certain criteria for significance, strength, and reproducibility. More here: https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/investigating-re....

Thanks so much! That's exactly the point.

Great question. We present all the evidence behind a relationship (on "evidence cards" that show the source, strength, sign, direction, population, controls, and reproducibility). The evidence cards on a relationship page may conflict, and this is clear for users to see and evaluate. We also generate a natural language synthesis of the evidence. We are working on enhancing our meta-analysis of the evidence to flag these kinds of conflicts. And our community will surely play an important role (as is the case on Wikipedia).

And we're big fans of those often hilarious spurious correlations!

But System filters them out (methodologies here: https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/investigating-re... and here: https://docs.system.com/system/how-system-works/relationship...).

Relationships on System are gathered, stored, and presented with a variety of contextualizing fields designed to help System and users evaluate and weigh the evidence. These include Strength, Sign, Direction, Population, Controls, and Reproducibility.

ICYI we discuss and review these methodologies on our slack community (link on system.com).

Thanks for the feedback.

Relationships on System carry several parameters that address your question. For example, in what population was this measured/what time period, a normalized measure of the statistical strength, statistical significance, the direction of the relationship when possible, the sign of the relationship, and a measure of the reproducibility of the evidence. You can read more in our docs: https://docs.system.com/system/how-system-works/relationship.... Our aim is to synthesize (or meta-analyze) all of this evidence and associated metadata in such a way that helps users take actions. An open causal model of the world, to use Pearl's framing.

Love the question re cybernetics. I am inspired by the writing of Mary Catherine Bateson on the matter. She has argued that the tragedy of the cybernetic revolution, which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets, she says, in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.

Thanks! Updated.

Hi, I'm the founder of System (www.system.com). System is a free, open, and living public resource that aims to explain how anything in the world in related to everything else.

We just launched our public beta. You can read the announcement post here: https://about.system.com/blog/announcing-the-public-beta-of-...

We would love your feedback.

TL;DR:

- We formed a Public Benefit Corporation, committed to open knowledge and advancing systems thinking, to operate System.

- Our mission is to relate everything, to help, the world see and solve anything, as a system.

- System is built on top of a novel, large-scale graph platform that gathers and organizes evidence of statistical associations between things in the world.

- Like Wikipedia, the information on System is available under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License, and topic definitions on System are sourced from Wikidata.

- Anyone will be soon able to contribute evidence of relationships to System using a variety of tools. v1.0-beta is read only. The determination of what datasets, models, and papers statistics are retrieved from currently falls to members of our team and to users who are beta testing the tools we've built to contribute to System.

- We invite you to join a diverse community of systems thinkers from all walks of like who are coming together to build System.

That choice will hopefully always be true in a free society.

I founded System because the biggest challenges we face in the world — from COVID to climate change — are systemic, yet our data and knowledge are organized into silos. I believe this fundamental incongruity makes it impossible to think, plan, and act systemically. As a result, we are stifled in our ability to reliably predict outcomes, make decisions, mitigate risks, and improve the state of the world for everyone.

System is a shared tool for systems thinking — and, we hope, a springboard for collective action.

We have great respect for freebase (see comment below on metaweb) and WA. System offers a different lens on data and knowledge rooted in the statistical associations between things in the world.

Thank you

These threads on Product Hunt may be useful to some: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/system

No, Wikidata is an open database of semantic definitions and relationships. System is a public resource that aims to explain how anything in the world is related to everything else based on statistical evidence. Semantic vs statistical is the difference.

System is possible today because of Wikidata and the advancement of open knowledge: All definitions on System are sourced from Wikidata. System will contribute back to the open knowledge commons with a new, free, open, and living knowledge base of statistically-based relationships between things in the world.

Thanks for sharing our beta Danielle! We appreciate it. I'm the founder of System.

Thanks very much. We hope System will be complementary to Wikipedia. They share a core open ontology that will allow for possible future interoperability.

That is very much the risk and one we have taken on as part of our tech and culture from day one. Today, System considers parameters like evidence reproducibility, significance, and statistical strength. But there is a lot more to do here. As a Public Benefit Corporation, we've codified it in our charter that we must consider and share the potential unintended consequences of each major release. And we'll be publishing our first such report shortly.

We're big fans of metaweb (and had one of their founding engineers as an advisor early on).

At their essence, knowledge graphs (like metaweb) are based on semantic relationships, e.g. coffee is a beverage, apple and banana are fruit, diabetes is a disease, etc. System, instead, is based on statistical relationships (collected and synthesized from data, models, and papers): A predicts B, C is caused by D, E and F are highly correlated, G and H change together, etc. While statistics (probabilities for example) can definitely be used in a KG (and certainly in large scale ones), the nature of the relationships themselves (x is a movie, x stars y) are semantic.

By organizing these (billions and billions of) statistical relationships on System, anyone will be able see anything that's important to them as the system it truly is, rather than the silo we often see today.

We hope these will be complementary ways of understanding the world -- one based on language, the other based on statistics. Importantly, System leverages the same core ontology as Wikipedia (i.e. Wikidata) so the definition of "coffee" on System is the same as on Wikipedia. So these two ways are very intentionally interoperable.

You can read more about System's methodologies in our technical documentation: docs.system.com/system.