[HN Gopher] System - A resource that aims to explain how everyth...
___________________________________________________________________
System - A resource that aims to explain how everything in the
world is related
Author : daniellenewnham
Score : 106 points
Date : 2022-03-14 10:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.system.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.system.com)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Great idea. Visionary idea, could be really significant I love
| it.
|
| How did you get the domain and how much did you pay?
| sideproject wrote:
| I was going to say.. what a great domain name you got there...
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| dmje wrote:
| Isn't this wikidata? [1]
|
| https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| tux3 wrote:
| >System is a public resource that aims to explain how
| anything in the world is related to everything else based on
| statistical evidence
|
| People have made a game out of finding spurious correlations
| that are both impressive and funny.
|
| For now the site seems to have a focus on Medicine. That's
| great because we spend a whole lot of money running RCTs and
| collecting trial data. But the stakes are also very high.
|
| How do you make sure that System doesn't accidentally become
| a public resource that explains how anything is (spuriously)
| related to everything else by confounders and unfortunate
| correlations?
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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).
| MaggieL wrote:
| Drivel. Intro is global warming alarmism.
| Aachen wrote:
| I don't know what drivel means, but I also thought that claim
| was a bit out of place when I saw it in the video (the only
| thing I can see on mobile...). Sure, yeah, we have droughts and
| climate change on our hands, but what does that tell me about
| your product? Instead of using scammer tactics of instilling
| fear and urgency with a looming problem that only they can fix,
| just tell me what the product is. I had to scroll quite far
| down in the comments to find it (specifically this comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30689872) because the
| video is just too abstract.
|
| Edit: looked up drivel, learned a new word today. Not quite how
| I'd describe this product though...
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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-...).
| daniellenewnham wrote:
| System is a free, open, and living public resource that aims to
| explain how anything in the world is related to everything else.
| WalterGR wrote:
| Nice domain name.
| adam_bly wrote:
| Thank you
| adam_bly wrote:
| Thanks for sharing our beta Danielle! We appreciate it. I'm the
| founder of System.
| toss1 wrote:
| Interesting concept, potential to scale like Wikipedia
|
| They'll definitely need to attend to the same problems of
| preventing poisoning of the well by partisans, hacks, cranks, and
| general malcontents.
|
| Looking forward to it!
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| _justinfunk wrote:
| I don't understand this. Surely there are lots of things that are
| connected in ways that aren't mapped here:
|
| COVID-19 and Vaccination, Real Estate Price and Housing,
| Socioeconomic Status and Happiness are all nodes that are not
| connected in the graph - but are obviously connected in the real
| world.
|
| Is this a WIP until everything is connected to everything else?
| teawrecks wrote:
| I wouldn't say a direct connection between those things is
| "obvious". Seems like you could just as easily argue that they
| are "obviously" indirectly related (ex. COVID-19 would effect
| social distancing, which would effect population density, which
| would effect real estate and housing).
|
| But I agreed that the "nodes" I just made up are arbitrary, and
| that you could make an argument that everything effects
| everything else in some way. So it's not clear to me what gets
| to be a node and what constitutes an edge.
|
| A noble effort, I'm all for exploring it, but it seems like pie
| in the sky.
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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....
| amelius wrote:
| Why not mine the data from Wikipedia?
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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).
| TruffleLabs wrote:
| Seeking the ever elusive Oracle to help us make sense...
|
| And when we have the Oracle, we can still choose to ignore what
| it tells us...
|
| I believe Freebase was trying to meet similar goals (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database) )
|
| And Wolfram Alpha has similar features/functions to provide a
| look into data & its connections ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/
| )
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| heavyarms wrote:
| First of all, I'd like to say that this looks like a great
| project and I wish you the best of luck. I've done a bit of work
| on building knowledge graphs from semi-structured data and I know
| that every aspect of it is challenging. Obviously there's the
| data pipelines, ETL, semantic matching/categorization,
| statistical models, etc. Just building a simple UI for presenting
| a large knowledge graph was more challenging than most front end
| work I've ever done.
|
| Question: if the goal is to build a knowledge graph that can
| "explain how anything in the world is related to everything else"
| how do you measure progress toward that goal? And how do you
| measure the quality? Just having a bunch of topics and
| relationships is not a great metric in my opinion. Obviously this
| is still very early, but here's an example I found in about 30
| seconds of clicking around:
|
| "Evidence suggests that Heart Failure is related to Income and
| COVID-19." [https://www.system.com/view/topic/P0XELnR0PaK]
|
| There are topics in System for "Obesity" and "Smoking", but those
| are not associated to Heart Failure.
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| monstertruck wrote:
| (Note: I work at System)
|
| First, thanks! If you'd like to reach out and learn more or
| talk about your learnings from building something like this
| we'd be very interested (we have a Slack community and a direct
| contact form on the site).
|
| As for your questions - we have tools for assessing the
| reproducibility (in the statistical sense) of models and
| relationships added to System, as well as tools for users (and
| built in to the platform itself) to assess the relative
| statistical strength between any two relationships that you
| find on the site.
|
| And, yes, we're early on in the process of writing (peer-
| reviewed) evidence on various topics, and as you note, the
| value of seeing these systems will grow with how detailed the
| topics are covered and the overall number of the world's topics
| shown to be related. I hope you'll stay engaged to see!
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Please don't redirect mobile users to a broken mobile website!
|
| Only use a mobile redirect if you _actually_ have a mobile site.
| Otherwise give us the desktop experience.
| moniecodes wrote:
| Hi @vorpalhex,
|
| We attempt to redirect to our mobile site
| about.system.com/mobile and are working on a mobile friendly
| version.
|
| Apologies that you are experiencing issues. Could you send us
| more details through our feedback tab or our slack community or
| email hello@system.com(If you could also attach a screenshot,
| it would be really helpful to see what you are seeing).
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Your mobile version is not the app. It is a fancy "under
| construction!" page. Delete that page. Just send mobile users
| to your app.
|
| Your app works fine on mobile as is.
|
| You don't need a mobile site. Just (eventually, as a small
| improvement) make your viewports a bit more responsive in
| size.
| SilasX wrote:
| Actually, even then, the desktop version is usually better on
| mobile.
|
| Example LedgerX won't even show you your option Greeks on
| mobile ... even when you ask for desktop!
| gffrd wrote:
| Maybe a silly question, but: why?
|
| Is this a way of visualizing connections in a way that, for
| instance, Wikipedia cannot?
| adam_bly wrote:
| These threads on Product Hunt may be useful to some:
| https://www.producthunt.com/posts/system
| lostmsu wrote:
| I love the idea. Something that I personally live by, but made
| available to everyone in a format similar to Wikipedia.
|
| RE the core: how are you planning to handle internal
| contradictions, which will no doubt appear at some moment. Any
| plans for formal verification?
|
| RE the UI: while looking cool, the 3D interface feels inferior
| to Wikipedia-like navigation, in particular cards.
| monstertruck wrote:
| (I work at System)
|
| First, thanks!
|
| By internal contradictions, do you mean conflicting evidence
| in the relationship between topics or metrics? That will (and
| does) come up regularly - peer-reviewed studies investigating
| the same topics have differently measured (or contradictory)
| results. We have tools for assessing the statistical quality
| of submitted relationships (through things like statistical
| reproducibility, algorithm type, statistical controls, etc.),
| so unreproducible or statistically unlikely relationships
| will be clearly seen as such. Building tools to
| programmatically test reproducibility of evidence is
| definitely something we've thought about (if that's the
| "formal verification" you are talking about).
|
| Ultimately the goal will be to (statistically) approximate
| the sum total of all evidence between pairs of topics, and
| also to provide users with the tools and sources to assess
| (and apply!) that evidence.
| nojonestownpls wrote:
| RE your first question, one of their answers from product
| hunt may be useful:
|
| > Q: Is this supposed to be open source version of Google's
| knowledge graph?
|
| > A: At their essence, KGs are based on semantic
| relationships, e.g. coffee is a beverage, apple and banana
| are fruit, diabetes is a disease, etc. System 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.
| [...] We hope these will be complementary ways of
| understanding the world -- one based on language, the other
| based on statistics.
|
| I think internal contradictions are more of an issue for a
| Knowledge Graph, which try to infer things and have to make
| conclusions based on possibly contradictory evidence. System
| just tries to present the available connecting evidence
| without making object level conclusions itself.
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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).
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| jdubb wrote:
| The link you provided gives a 404. This one works:
| https://about.system.com/blog/announcing-the-public-beta-of-...
| adam_bly wrote:
| Thanks! Updated.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Initial thoughts:
|
| At the end of your intro video you ask the viewer to imagine
| what could be possible with such a system. But that's putting
| the onus on the viewer, who has likely never thought about such
| a system, rather than the creator who is selling the vision.
| I'd encourage you to give some concrete examples on what could
| really be achieved here.
|
| When everything is related to everything, it's hard to get
| anything actionable out of such a model. Further qualifying the
| edges should also matter a lot... is something correlated?
| Causal? Indirectly related? How far does the causality
| propagate? For example, could changing the formula for
| toothpaste affect obesity? I'd imagine it would be easy to draw
| a graph connecting these things, but it's probably difficult to
| know if a causal change is likely to produce the desired
| result.
|
| This reminds me a lot of cybernetics, which ultimately failed.
| I'm be curious for your thoughts on that field and it's
| relationship to your endeavor.
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| manmal wrote:
| My master's thesis was related to finding and implementing a
| music library vis tool, which should show relations between
| artists and songs by grouping them together. One important aspect
| I learned is that, in 2D space, there are only so many nodes you
| can add before the graph becomes useless. You could display nodes
| multiple times in the same graph, but this lowers usability a
| great deal.
|
| I'm curious how this problem will be dealt with.
| dboreham wrote:
| This looks like metaweb (acquired by Google long ago).
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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.
| daenz wrote:
| Ambitious!
|
| In a similar space, I wish someone would make a graph like this
| for materials required to produce something, for society-
| bootstrapping. For example, the different tools and materials
| required to make a functioning water well, and how to make those
| tools and materials.
| malka wrote:
| A real life technology tree would be cool
| daenz wrote:
| Exactly. It could be built incrementally as well, with
| placeholders, until the relevant experts are consulted who
| can fill out the details.
| garethcoleman wrote:
| V. Interesting approach, but does making connections statistical
| avoid making system a consistent system as in in Godel
| incompleteness? How does system represent things like the liar
| paradox (if it does?).
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| How is this type of UI classified? All elements have no color
| fill, just borders. Wireframe, maybe?
| melony wrote:
| Wannabe IBM
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| You're probably not serious about your comment. But... thanks
| anyway. I found this IBM design website with some elements
| that align in concept with the ones at System.
|
| https://www.ibm.com/design/language/iconography/ui-
| icons/des...
| agentdrtran wrote:
| I clicked on "unemployment" and the results were unsatisfying to
| say the least. All it told me was that unemployment is related to
| being out of work or unemployed. I love the idea though.
| adam_bly wrote:
| 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?
| melony wrote:
| How much did that domain cost?
| Aachen wrote:
| I was thinking the same. Quite sad really: if simply nobody
| else was using it for something useful yet, it should just be
| available... I hate that domain squatting is legal.
|
| I'm fine with normal trade. I might use such a domain for
| personal use if this is my nickname or something, and if
| someone wants to have it and I want money for that, that's fine
| (it's annoying for me to move after all), but just buying whole
| dictionaries of domains... should be illegal for a scarce
| resource.
| amelius wrote:
| If that were the case, they would just install some simple
| game on that domain, so nobody could claim the domain was
| unused.
| lekevicius wrote:
| No idea, but system.com can tell that domain cost is related
| to: TLD, word being common, word being short. Hopefully that
| was useful! (sarcasm)
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-15 23:00 UTC)