The Open Research Institute Onboarding Process
I AM A RESEARCHER! HEAR MY ROOOOOAR!!!
What is ORI?
The Open Research Institute (ORI) is an open and public network of researchers working on anything and everything1.
It’s best to think of it as having an informal and formal meaning. In the informal sense, it is the human project of growing in wisdom, aspiring to perfection. You can count Socrates, St. Augustine, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Newton, and Dawkins as part of the informal ORI. But in the formal sense, it is a collective of people who have organized themselves in order contribute to this project in the best possible way.
Academia, right?
Wrong.
Academia is a gated institution. For example, there is a whole economy credentialization and legitimation that is not defined by the practitioners themselves. This doesn’t make it a bad thing, but these features do contrast it with ORI. ORI, is not gated in any way. Each node in the network is accessible to each node, and is responsible for its own filtering of noise and signal.
Currently, there are two chapters of ORI2, each in a separate discord, with an overlap of some people. But Discord isn’t the homebase for ORI—the whole idea is that ORI is not medium bound to any form. Some can create a chapter of ORI using Slack, a Whatsapp group, and if it tickles their fancy, a physical republic of letters.
So in one sense, every researcher is part of this network as far as their research is public, and this would include academics. But in a narrower and more formal sense, there are people who identify as ORI researchers, and benefit from being part of the formal network. This network has both active researchers who self-identify as part of ORI, as well as a network of supporters. I, personally, fit in both buckets.
The Researcher Profile
As someone who strives to make this network as powerful as possible, it needs open organizational structures that support it. Below, I’ll walk you through what a researcher can do in order to fit the form of ORI in a way that will help them and the whole network wisen.
As a researcher, the most important thing is to be able to connect to other progress that has already been made. The method for ORI is for each researcher to have a public profile page that helps us find each other. That’s how we actualize the power of ORI. (Otherwise were just a bunch of people with three capital letters in our twitter and substack bio, hardly something efficient in moving human towards greatness.)
This profile page needs to be quickly legible, and have all the information so any person, be it researcher, funder, or student, can discern if your research is what they are looking for.
This is not as simple as it sounds. It’s not easy to be properly legible. Luckily, all we need is for the researchers to be legible enough, to enter an efficient positive feedback loop.
There’s two parts to consider in what to include in a profile page. On one hand, you want enough information so that you don’t miss anyone important. On the other hand, you don’t want any information that’s irrelevant. There’s no way to do it perfectly; the point is to be as good as possible. Good as possible means that we don’t want a researcher to be wasting time optimizing for publicity over their actual work.
I’m going to walk you through as I write my own ORI Researcher Profile and show you how easy and fun it is.
C’mon, let’s go!
WRITING PROCESS
Northstar
What is your ultimate goal, or the best concise description of your research trajectory? This will work best if kept to 40 to 200 words.
The first thing I’ll write is my Northstar. Writing this up is really fun, because it forces me to see myself as the bright light I am. What am I trying to do? What do I care about? Who am I as a researcher?
Seeing another person’s Northstar is a great vibe check, as you can imagine. Just look at mine!
Shadow_Rebbe’s Northstar
The deepest educational question is what kind of person we should be trying to form and what kind of pedagogy would make that formation real. My work focuses on aspirational human excellence, especially forms expressed in unusual wisdom, curiosity, power of thought, and intellectual excellence that carries across domains and across a lifetime. From there, I am interested in the qualities, habits, and patterns of mind that constitute such excellence, and in how they can be taught, cultivated, and spread.
A central obstacle is what I think of as the Gorgias problem in education: a system that rewards seeming over being, substitutes shallow metrics for reality, and trains people to outsource judgment to external authority. Part of my work is therefore both pedagogical and epistemological, exploring whether and how Socratic conversations, epistemology for children, and accelerant habits can help form people who are exponentially wiser than ourselves. This is part of a larger vision in which humans can consistently generate individuals and societies that are consistently more capable and producing more intelligent and beneficent humans.
Live Questions
Now that my Northstar is articulated (SO MUCH F**KING FUN!) the next thing to track are those live inquiries and questions that I am working on. Of all the information I’ll be plugging in, these are the most dynamic.
Seeing someone else’s live questions lets you orient yourself to their research. They might tell you that this researcher is way beyond yourself and that you can learn from them, or that they are way behind and you can help them.
In fact, one way of thinking of these live questions are like requests for an answer from the collective human intelligence. Any fellow ORI researcher who sees these live questions and has something to contribute to a response will be happy to do so!
For some researchers, the list of live questions and inquiries are very tight and concise. It could literally be just one item. For others it might be tens of questions.
My suggestion is just to write down what you think are your live questions and start with that. This list is meant to be very dynamic, and change as you progress3.
Here’s my list, with the most passionate inquiries in bold:
Frame
What is the right unit of analysis for intellectual excellence: virtues, habits, dispositions, moves, attentional styles, discourse practices, identity structures, stages, or something else?
Is intellectual excellence better presented as tools, habits, stages, or some combination?
Core cognitive patterns
Which patterns of thought most accelerate future learning?
Are introspective epistemic skills built first by noticing structure in others and only later in oneself?
What distinguishes fruitful questions from shallow, performative, vague, or inert ones?
Schooling and its distortions
What educational practices do not merely fail to cultivate understanding, but actively block it by rewarding the wrong inner signals?
What exactly is the schooled mind as a coherent structure to surpass?
What would a pedagogy of vigor, freedom, and agency look like as opposed to a pedagogy of submission and neutering?
Environments and formation
What kinds of initiation produce seekers rather than conformists?
How can environments of high intellectual formation be made accessible to ordinary parents and non-elites without becoming formulaic and dead?
People and traditions to study
Who has given a serious account of the excellent human that does not reduce excellence to shallow productivity, credentials, or conformity?
Who has tried to identify traits or habits that produce long-term learning gains rather than short-term intervention effects?
Defining the Domain
The next step is to use my Northstar and my Live Questions to articulate my domain. In universities this is easy because of all the institutional mechanisms like faculties, certifications and journals. These are a source of strength as well as a weakness; some forms of knowledge are not pursued simply because they don’t fit any box.
In ORI you can use key-words that will make it clear what you are doing, just like many academic abstracts do. Personally, I like hashtags, maybe because I missed out on the craze when it was happening. But nobody is limited to what they use as keywords or how many. The function is to make yourself immediately legible with regards to your domain. You don’t want people wasting time looking for you nor wasting time trying to figure out if you are relevant.
Tier 1:
#Philosophy-of-Education #Epistemology-for-Children #Metacognition-for-Children #Developmental-Psychology #Socratic-Method #Intellectual-Virtue #Human-Excellence #Educational-Theory #Schooling
But besides my main domain, there are other facets of my research that are important enough to mention, even if they aren’t core, these secondary features get mentioned in a (drumroll) secondary tier list.
Tier 2:
#Virtue_Epistemology #Cognitive_Transformation_Theory #Educational-Psychology #Institutional_Critique #Live_Players #Qualitative_Cybernetics #Straussian_Esoteric_Education
For me, this seems like enough to cut out my space. But there are other ways to do this. You might want to list your lineage as a way to define your space. That’s what Neo-Freudians and Jungians do, right? Or you might want to list the people you are paying attention to and why.
What You Want
Lastly, you might want to include what you are looking for: funding, collaborators,or whatever. I don’t have anything clear on my profile, because while I’d always like some $, right now I’m just looking to be more visible. What’s nice is that that you can always update your profile.
PUBLIC WORK
ORI’s ethos is that the research is public. Hence, to be part of ORI’s network you should display some public research, and contact information.
This work doesn’t need to be an academic article. Here are a few examples to show you how broad the range of public research can be.
Here’s my latest essay:
The research I want to make accessible is on my substack. That plus my X handle should be enough to make me accessible to anyone that wants to reach me.
All done! THAT WAS FUN!
Now, look at my final version: as PDF!
If you want to collaborate, DM me here or on X!
Other Profiles
Here are two more examples of ORI researchers.
https://othmangbad.substack.com/about
https://observertheory.substack.com/about
Naturally, they didn’t follow my exact formula (they made their profile pages before this post!). That’s ok!
The ORI Network
Imagine seeing another researcher’s keywords. Just from a glance you can tell if they are relevant. Even better, in a database (not yet existent) it would be easy to search and find the people who are working on the things you need.
The idea is that keywords help you find the people working in the domain you care about, so you can filter out what’s irrelevant. The higher resolution Northstar, Live Questions and public research allow you to get higher resolution on how you can collaborate.
If this piece helped you notice that you are a researcher, then welcome to the club! Now’s a great time to create your profile page and accelerate towards a more beautiful world. Or maybe you already know you are a researcher, but you’ve never put in the effort to make yourself legible. For you too, now’s a great time to make yourself a profile page.
Once you have a profile page, (or if you already have one), please feel invited to respond to this post with your page. The next step is to start creating directories—and that can only be done with visible artifacts.4
ORI is here to help open you up to to knowledge that you are reaching for.
So, watcha waitin’ for?
C’mon les go!
Stay Tuned…
In my next post, I’ll discuss what happens when this doesn’t work—we already have an anti-fragile model that will make every unfruitful onboarding into a data piece that helps us improve our system.
Update May 1st 2026: My next post was actual research, and this is not likely to be written up in the near future. But in one sentence: imagine researchers of community building using you as data to solve problems. Your problem is their problem. In return for the right to document you as a case study, they help.
A researcher is anyone who is intentionally investigating something and try broaden and/or deepen the collective intelligence of humanity is a researcher. It took me a long time to realize that this is what I am; and for a while my best self-understanding that I could communicate was ‘philosopher’. Now I can introduce myself as an independent researcher, and people understand what I’m getting at right away.
I’m in this one: https://openresearchinstitute.org/ORI-defender.html which belongs to Omar. You might know him by his alter-identity…
I tried to first write up my own list. Then, plug all my relevant writing into Gpt and ask it to summarize my other live questions. After that, I asked it to group them into natural clusters. Finally, I reviewed he questions (33 A5 pages!) myself and edit them, making sure they are accurately worded.
This took waay longer than I would have liked it to. In truth, I am really happy with the fact that I’m being forced to actually clarify this for myself.
But in hindsight, if I wanted to just get a minimum viable profile, which is the wise way to begin, I would have just started with my first list and edited it when new things came up.
Notice how ORI products, like this onboarding guide, serve to empower ORI and it’s members. We’ve got lots of tricks up our sleeves.
it's alive! MWAHAHAHAHHA!
https://taijitusees.substack.com/p/ori-onboarding-northstar-perspective