Why no percentages · Windrose Institute
An honest instrument

Any AI can print "your conversion will be 23%." It will be wrong.

The category sells false precision. We sell a direction you can trust, and a label that tells you exactly how far to trust it. This is the argument, in full.

Synthetic research has a dirty secret: the numbers look precise and aren't. Peer-reviewed work shows that language models do not reliably reproduce human psychology, absolute predictions drift, distributions collapse, and confident decimals hide guesswork. We built Windrose Institute on that finding, not against it.

So here is our deal with you. Without real-world data, Windrose Institute reports three things it can defend: the direction of an effect, the ranking of your variants, and the hypotheses most worth your scarce time.

Every number ships with an evidence label, what rung it stands on, whether it's calibrated, and where our backtests say the simulator can be trusted. When we don't know, the product says "we don't know." That's not a disclaimer. That's the product.

Bring your own outcomes later, sales, sign-ups, past experiments, and the label climbs from SIMULATION to a CALIBRATED rung. Only your real data earns that, never us.

What we report instead

Three things we can defend under scrutiny.

DIRECTION

Which way the effect points.

Does this message help or hurt? Directional, and honest about its scope.

RANKING

Which variant is stronger, for whom.

Order over decimals, with a stability score for how firmly it holds.

HYPOTHESES

What to test in the real world next.

The bridge to fieldwork, the conversations worth having first.

When we don't know, the product says so. That's not a disclaimer, that's the product.

The methodical questions.

How accurate is this?

We report direction and ranking, not absolute numbers. Every result carries a backtest class and an evidence label showing exactly where the simulator can be trusted, and where it can't.

Why should I trust a simulation?

You shouldn't, blindly. That's why every result carries its rung on the evidence ladder. A simulation selects which hypotheses to test first; it never stands in for real-world data.

Is this a replacement for talking to customers?

No. It tells you which conversations to have first.

What data is the population built on?

Census demographics and published survey attitudes, parameterised by documented cultural frames. The full source list lives on the Science page.

See the whole method, then run your own.

The three axes of uncertainty, the backtest protocol, the full label, all on the Science page.