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

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.

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.)