Create a New Era in Social Science Research

By developing the world’s first fundamental theory of social systems.

The Big Problems with Statistics

Statistics is the main tool used for social science research. It however has some major flaws, severely limiting its use for social sciences research.

The Big Problems are:
  • Low Trustworthiness   - the replication crisis showed that most statistical results cannot be trusted
  • Very Limited Scope      - it only works with the few rare effects that have a high signal-to-noise ratio
  • Disconnected Insights - the individual statistical models & insights cannot be combined to make predictions of real-world scenarios where many effects take place simultaneously
As long as these problems persist, we are limited to understanding only a small fraction of human behavior.


The Solution : Fundamental Theory Building

This online statistics platform - Tree of Knowledge - introduces a radically new approach to statistics which solves all of the above problems.

This new approach to statistics - called 'Fundamental Theory Building' - not only provides insights which are orders of magnitude more accurate, reliable and insightful than what's possible with current statistics, it also allows researcher's to create the world's first accurate fundamental theory of humans and other social actors (e.g. institutions, countries and companies).

About Fundamental Theories

Fundamental theories like Newton’s Theory of Mechanics and the Theory of Electro-Magnetism have revolutionized engineering and are the foundation for most modern technology.
They give engineers the power to accurately simulate any mechanical & electronic system, which is the key to creating all modern inventions.

So far, these theories only exist for physical systems - limiting the revolutionary advancements in modern technology to physical systems such as aerospace, electronics and telecommunications. This is about to change - the online platform www.treeofknowledge.ai introduces a new approach to statistics which enables the creation of the world’s first accurate fundamental theories of humans and other social actors. With these new theories, we can now create exact simulations - not only of physical systems, but of social systems, too - allowing for social scientists to do just as as advanced engineering!

Imagine a world in which public policies and regulations were precisely engineered:
A world in which social aid was engineered to have the maximal impact; economic stimuli were carefully designed to be maximally efficient; and foreign policy was proven to be aligned with long-term objectives...
This is the power of accurate fundamental theories.



Advantages


Continuous & Measurable Progress

Video Summary:

Working with a fundamental theory is a lot easier and less work than having to make sense of a large collection of individual insights. It gives us a cohesive and complete understanding and allows us to make accurate predictions for any scenario.
Most importantly, the rigorous evaluation framework allows us to objectively determine which candidate theory is the best - this is the key to real, measurable and lasting scientific progress!


Reliable & Universal

Video Summary:

Confidence in scientific findings comes from the finding but from it being shown to hold true in many circumstances.
Tree of knowledge tests hypotheses in hundreds of different scenarios, making them immensely more reliable and trustworthy than the findings from normal statistical analyses. Also, this rigorous testing assures the general applicability/universality of these results.


Understanding complex systems

Video Summary:

Most complex systems cannot be studied due to the many different effects that are going on simultaneously. These intertwined effects make it impossible to clearly measure and model any single effect.
Tree of knowledge solves this problem - With all the already-modelled phenomena on the platform, it becomes very easy to make models that allow us to peer through this complexity by capturing all the different effects in the model.
Opening up for study: vast, previously-too-complex areas of reseach.






How it works


(More details can be found in this paper.)







Frequently Asked Questions


The differences between people are taken into account in the different behavior rules we create.
E.g. the trigger for the action “tidy the house” should depend on a person's hygiene level. Which in turn might depend on other things.

I believe that having a low accuracy (= wide uncertainty) isn't a bad thing.
Being trained-on and optimized to hundreds of datasets, makes Tree of Knowledge the most accurate fundamental theory out there. If the most accurate existing theory says that there is a high uncertainty attached to a specific prediction, then we can be fairly confident that this is truly the case.

I think that being honest about the limits of our knowledge in this way is very important and is a refreshing change to some of the alternatives - both hypothesis tests and popular rethoric have a strong tendency to overstate their confidence in predictions.

This is a problem that psychology and similar disciplines have faced for a long time. There is a consensus on how to deal with these difficulties, which are described in the field of measurement theory. Tree of knowledge recommends sticking to this consensus.

However, this platform will allow us to see which rules most accurately describe human behavior… it might turn out that things work differently after all.






Revolutionizing Social Sciences