The Syllabus

Open Research Institute (ORI)

A new chapter in the story of a public literature.

April 04, 2026

Class dismissed.

The Syllabus

 is an 

ORI
ORI is currently a live experiment in improving the culture of science & its communication (for researchers and laypeople alike). It is maintained & funded by Prosocial Engineering.
https://openresearchinstitute.org/

 curated by 

Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ
This is Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ, a site built with Markdown Space
https://pages.markdown.space/sunriseoath

.

The Syllabus is an open research institute (ORI) curated by Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ.

UPDATE (2026-04-06). The (meta-)ORI homepage has since been updated by DefenderOfBasic!

ORI
It is simply the center that steers towards survival & flourishing. It is not always visible to the general public, but it is always visible to those who can recognize its structure & influence. ORI is either that center, or it is the group that searches for it.
https://openresearchinstitute.org/

This is still different from my own conception, since I think of meta-ORI and the ORI protocol as a technology like Linux or Git, while a specific ORI can have goals which differ from or even oppose the aims of those who founded the technology. But it also marks the beginning of a new meta-ORI homepage distinct from the homepages of individual ORI chapters. From this point on, Defender and I are collaborating on the meta-ORI level while keeping healthy competition between our chapters.

Here is the homepage for Defender's ORI chapter, which also is the old homepage for the entire site:

ORI
ORI is currently a live experiment in improving the culture of science & its communication (for researchers and laypeople alike). It is maintained & funded by Prosocial Engineering.
https://openresearchinstitute.org/ORI-defender.html

From the Open Research Institute website (as of April 4, 2026):

ORI is the "open research institute". Its purpose is to map the frontier of human knowledge & maintain the fastest highway from it to the backtier, and back

ORI is currently a live experiment in improving the culture of science & its communication (for researchers and laypeople alike). It is maintained & funded by Prosocial Engineering.

This is quite different from the ORI I knew (or at least understood), back when I was the second (after DefenderOfBasic himself) member of its current Discord server.

The first part
The first part declares that it maps the frontier. However, what is properly the frontier?

The first part

ORI is the "open research institute". Its purpose is to map the frontier of human knowledge & maintain the fastest highway from it to the backtier, and back

The first part declares that it maps the frontier. However, what is properly the frontier?

A frontier is alternatively the outer extremes ("the march") of a country, or the vanguard (again, "the march") of an army. One considers a known outer territory relative to a known inner territory, while the other considers a known outer population relative to a known inner population.

I find myself more of the opinion that a literature of the best human knowledge contains part of the frontier, and that the frontier of human knowledge ought to refer to the literature of the best human knowledge. It is not necessarily the case that the frontier of human knowledge, as is, is worth mapping.

It seems to be, in my view, that the job of an open research institute should not be to map projects and materials (or people-as-sign-makers), but rather to track people-as-interpreters. The Defender chapter of ORI (with him as a "provost", as I would call it; or a "CEO", as he would call it) does still monitor the feeds of well-known figures like Michael Levin and shares highlights to the rest of the network, but I personally find that this results in isolated sound bites that merely create a vibe rather than allowing for a robust systematic understanding. I personally have felt that my own attempts to contribute have largely been made into one-off novelties, with my text (my flesh!) appropriated by interpretations other than the one I intend. There is no unified and legible spirit holding everything together; insofar that a unified spirit exists, it is often invisible and completely unquestioned.

To me, what matters is not the march-as-territory, but rather the march-as-army. To put it in terms of eschatology, what matters less is tracking models of the exact details of heaven, but rather recording the history of the (visible) church of the elect and so creating further entries within an existing literature. (Entries in a literature pointing back to past contributions also serves as an index or table of contents of that literature.)

The second part
I originally thought that this section would be the one where I have much more to write about, since Defender's ORI being run by a parent organization is on its face much different than my own conception of ORI as a meta-project. But I realized after writing a fairly scathing first part (I like Defender and see him as a mentor and friend; he also is the one who inspired me to take initiative in this case!) that this part is much less objectionable to me, despite the large difference on the surface.
I admit to a somewhat contradictory (or at least outwardly confusing and misleading) attitude at the advent of ORI, where I simultaneously thought of Defender's public work as establishing an important meta-project but also thought that he should take much more charge of shaping the direction of his own chapter. It is of course hard to separate the role of Defender in establishing the meta-project and the role of Defender in leading his own project, since invariably what he says in one domain also affects the other.

The second part

ORI is currently a live experiment in improving the culture of science & its communication (for researchers and laypeople alike). It is maintained & funded by Prosocial Engineering.

I originally thought that this section would be the one where I have much more to write about, since Defender's ORI being run by a parent organization is on its face much different than my own conception of ORI as a meta-project. But I realized after writing a fairly scathing first part (I like Defender and see him as a mentor and friend; he also is the one who inspired me to take initiative in this case!) that this part is much less objectionable to me, despite the large difference on the surface.

I admit to a somewhat contradictory (or at least outwardly confusing and misleading) attitude at the advent of ORI, where I simultaneously thought of Defender's public work as establishing an important meta-project but also thought that he should take much more charge of shaping the direction of his own chapter. It is of course hard to separate the role of Defender in establishing the meta-project and the role of Defender in leading his own project, since invariably what he says in one domain also affects the other.

In some regards, I think that we have reached a "worst of both worlds" relative to my own interests (again, by my own interpretation, even though I also strongly think that you should believe my interpretation), where Defender's ORI homepage explicitly has a link to projects dabbling in New Age and Buddhist thought (which I disavow and which I think are not good to have mixed up in the image of the meta-project) but Defender's Discord server also now hosts many individuals who I think are best not kept on the inside and rather tended to in the courtyard or the guest room.

I also am not a fan of the presented aim of ORI as being about improving the culture of science and its communication. I think that this is part of a public literature project, but is definitely not the whole. This is why my own focus with The Syllabus is to direct attention to media studies and actual in-house literature creation rather than promoting outsider theories or alternative epistemological paradigms or linking outward to self-contained projects.

A lot of this is just a matter of language, and could be easily disambiguated. However, in practice, we have to consider how people understand the signs.

Leading (via curation) my own chapter of ORI would result in at least one chapter other than Defender's, and would give a chance for both of us to clear up the relationship between our instantiated communities (which would largely overlap, though I have some people from other communities who I am bringing in) and the grander public literature project on which we originally saw eye to eye.

We can think of The Syllabus as my attempt to disambiguate the language of "open research institute(s)" and thereby rectify some points of disagreements that I currently have with ORI as understood by others.

For some screenshots of the conversation between me and Defender that led up to The Syllabus, see below:

Conversation in a dusty scriptorium
The following screenshots are from a private Discord I run which in Defender's words is "Sunrise's ORI" (though in practice it never had enough activity or unification of mission to qualify as anything except an occasional hangout spot). There is an open-research channel in this Discord, where Defender and I would discuss matters related to my "slice" of the network from "Defender's ORI".
This led to Defender's tweet about "levels" to ORI, to some more discussion about the difference between the ORI protocol and the ORI community, and at last to the push I needed to start The Syllabus:

Conversation in a dusty scriptorium

The following screenshots are from a private Discord I run which in Defender's words is "Sunrise's ORI" (though in practice it never had enough activity or unification of mission to qualify as anything except an occasional hangout spot). There is an open-research channel in this Discord, where Defender and I would discuss matters related to my "slice" of the network from "Defender's ORI".

This led to Defender's tweet about "levels" to ORI, to some more discussion about the difference between the ORI protocol and the ORI community, and at last to the push I needed to start The Syllabus:

From now on, "Sunrise's ORI" has a true referent!

(For a summary of developments leading up to the point of writing on April 7, 2026, see "The Syllabus, ORI, and Meta-ORI" on Substack.)

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ORI 100: Meta-ORI

Pontius Pilate starring Defender

On Good Friday (April 3, 2026), I considered how in many regards Defender represents (in my own interpretation, of course; I believe my interpretation is powerful and useful, however) a sort of Pontius Pilate figure. He essentially relinquishes the duty of arbitration to the crowd, and instead focuses on visible signs which in many regards relieves him of blame. He is amazed by Jesus, but from the outside rather than from the inside; to consider what Jesus is saying from the inside would render him incapable of false neutrality.

To think of Jesus as an interesting Jewish teacher is to not think much of Jesus at all. The teachings of Jesus mean something because they are from Christ, the Messiah, God incarnate. The personal authority, and that chain leading back to the One, is of the utmost importance. Text is dead without an interpreting spirit.

The A/B/U model used by ORI for insights (with A being at the boundary of one's worldview, B being an existing integrated part of one's worldview, and U being a rejected thesis of one's worldview) is useful as a way of evaluating text, and even of evaluating text relative to specific interpreting spirits. This gets us quite close to Pentecost overturning Babel, but ends up settling back into Babel by trying to split the difference on the spirit at hand.

Defender: new milestone in ORI - I have no idea what the hell they're talking about. This is so exciting

I am sure that Jesus could have said many things that Pontius PIlate would consider to be As and Bs in his worldview. But it would be much better if he simply thought he was full of Us, or better yet saw him as himself the S thesis, the Word incarnate.

I think it is important to note how the people between whom Pontius Pilate was being excessively wishy-washy were themselves not at all wishy-washy and in fact would condemn this official's indecision on the issue were it not convenient in the moment. This is similar, in my view, to secular "irreligious" liberal democracies deciding to house Islamic and communist thought.

In developing a cohesive literature, we cannot in fact split the difference and just decide that a text is a fun novelty which two people can enjoy. To do this is to serve the secret view that there is in fact no correspondence to significance behind the signs.

To be clear, I think that the church can sometimes have the opposite problem of only reading through one branch of the tradition and so losing out on the richness of another branch. Either way, the interpretation has to be scoped to the branch. It is not enough to adopt "other ways of thinking" in the sense of just copying how they speak but then simply hearing that speech the way we would hear our own.

To curate a literature without specifically curating people and interpretations is to functionally curate bodies and animate them with whatever spirit is most convenient. This is, to put it bluntly, a false raising of the dead, a sort of necromancy.

A colorful description: sometimes (when things are ostensibly going the best, when I am most active in the existing ORI chapter) it feels like my children (my seed in the womb of rationalist and Calvinist coded English) are being bombed, and then their bodies are being raised as zombies by the cabal of the majority. I am then offered the dead children of others to order around, and find no pleasure in this despite perhaps being flattered by the offer.

At this point, I am convinced that the starting point for a functioning ORI is to simply enforce one cohesive tradition and then allow florid improvisation on top of that central canon. To do anything else is to simply use a less sophisticated invisible canon which likely is infested by the demons of deep history.

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