adam_bly

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.

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-...).

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.

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

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

What are you seeing?

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....

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).

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.

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.