[adam_bly]

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.

[azinman2]

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]

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.

[wbradley]

I went looking for mentions of Semantic Networks, RDF, triplets, taxonomy, or other common knowledge-related terms but I found nothing. Thoughts about pre-existing knowledge graph systems and how they may or may not apply to System? Thanks!

[jdubb]

The link you provided gives a 404. This one works: https://about.system.com/blog/announcing-the-public-beta-of-...

[adam_bly]

Thanks! Updated.

[CMay]

The post title immediately had me excited, because between the looming threat of dangerously fragmenting perspectives on truth and the fundamentals of automated artificial reasoning oriented towards meaning relevant to real world problems, ontology is of great interest. It's been the cause of much of my typing.

Unfortunately, the first impression was not good. I grant that the amount of data so far is limited and other questionable experiential aspects of the site aren't a knock on the underlying goal, but I can't help but feel that the way it's being done is not the inevitable future. That may only be a surface appearance, but when people put something out there and promote it, I assume they believe it's a fair representation of where their vision is headed.

There's also this nagging concern that the aim of this project can lead it to become an authoritative source on relationships which other software and services are forced to consume in order to compete, because the first open project of its type to reach escape velocity in respect to its data momentum may cement itself as the standard which suppresses the competition-promoting value of the data being forkable (not unlike Wikipedia).

15 years from now when it's passed a usefulness threshold, maybe most note taking apps, Microsoft Word, search engines, dictionaries, machine learning based services and more may come to rely upon it to improve access to context. At that scale it has non-negligible influence and the alpha-male status of it may limit evolutionary diversity around the intensity of the relatedness of things.

Don't get me wrong, a project like this is necessary anyway regardless of the potential dangers if only to head off a Chinese implementation to brainwash the world. To rephrase Netflix wanting to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix, don't become China before China can become you. The last thing we need is a monopolistic ministry of truth produced by runaway network effects that don't care about Public Benefits Charters. :)

Speaking of the Public Benefits Charter, Google never significantly defined "Don't Be Evil" in less vague terms, so the removal of it was harder to identify as a canary. The charter doesn't clarify what "scientific thinking" is, at a time when we are redefining what racism is with reckless abandon. I also didn't see any assurances about whether the charter would survive acquisition by another company and whether such an acquisition would be an exception to the promise to not sell user data. It also doesn't specify whether there's an active preservation clause.

We've seen Chinese acquisitions of sensitive companies pass by without notice providing further evidence that governments cannot be trusted to preserve their countries, it's up to the people. Companies themselves need to integrate a binding promise (if legally possible) to bar those outcomes and to carry that promise forward to acquirers which means any company operating in a state or country where such a promise could not be legally enforced doesn't qualify as a suitable parent company. Maybe that's wishful thinking, not a lawyer.

In any case, I think for this kind of project there is a likely leapfrog scenario that may cause it to be supplanted if the company doesn't do its own leapfrogging.

Additionally, there's the concern about whether the majority of the data qualifies as articles of fact which supposedly can't be copyrighted and could potentially nullify most of the impact of the CC-SA license. Luckily, all facts are fiction now, so you might be able to skirt by that one! Hope that doesn't mean embedding lies will be a future strategy to establish copyright snags for preserving enterprise customers. :/