Library
OSC is not just a place to conduct research; it's also a portal into traditions of curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility. This evolving library collects books, essays, podcasts, talks, and other materials that have influenced OSC and may help you deepen your own thinking. It is a deliberately curated collection rather than a comprehensive bibliography. As OSC participants discover more sources that shape their ideas, we will expand this library together. You do not need to read any of these materials to participate. Think of them as companions on your intellectual journey when the need arises.
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New to research? You may also enjoy the Research Vocabulary guide, which explains some of the concepts you'll encounter throughout OSC.
What Is Education For?
Achievement Culture and Higher Education
Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It (Jennifer Breheny Wallace) — Meditations on youth achievement culture.
Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (William Deresiewicz) — A critique of elite education and its tendency to reward achievement over purpose.
After the University: Higher Education and the Future of Intellectual Work (Chad Wellmon) — A history of the university, spanning 19th-century Prussia to 20th-century Tanzania to the 21st-century United States, exposing the deep tension between "disciplined study" and external rewards like money, prestige, and power.
The Life of Inquiry
“Rethinking High-School Science Fairs” (Leah Libresco Sargeant) — A reimagining of the science fair as a venue for genuine inquiry rather than performance.
“Restoring Science to Science Education” (Bruce Alberts) — A case for engaging students in the scientific process rather than transmitting established facts.
Letters to a Young Scientist (Edward O. Wilson) — A warm reflection on building a life devoted to discovery.
Breaking Through: My Life in Science (Katalin Karikó) — The inspiring memoir of the Nobel laureate who helped develop mRNA vaccines, illustrating the importance of curiosity, resilience, and following evidence despite repeated setbacks.
How Do People Learn?
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl) — An argument that children naturally learn like scientists: by exploring, testing ideas, and revising their understanding of the world.
"How Might We Learn?" (Andy Matuschak) — Explores how AI can support deep learning rather than simply providing answers. Matuschak's website also contains many innovative tools and essays for independent learners.
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel) — The title is not an exaggeration.
Ultralearning (Scott H. Young) — Practical strategies and inspiring examples of ambitious self-directed learning outside traditional classrooms.
How Should Research Work?
Open Science
The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science (Michael Strevens) — Explains how scientific institutions and norms allowed imperfect people to create increasingly reliable knowledge.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice (Chris Chambers) — A call for greater transparency, rigor, and honesty in psychology and science more broadly.
Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to Do Open Science (Garret Christensen, Jeremy Freese, and Edward Miguel) — A practical introduction to open science.
“A Manifesto for Reproducible Science” (Marcus R. Munafò et al.) — An overview of pivotal reforms in scientific culture.
Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) — Resources, training, and events for improving the credibility of social science.
Center for Open Science — An organization dedicated to making research more transparent, accessible, and trustworthy.
"The Six Camps of Metascience" (Caleb Watney and Jenn Gustetic) — A typology situating open science in a broader constellation of scientific reform movements.
How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University (Theo Baker) — A gripping account of how one student's commitment to evidence helped strengthen scientific accountability at one of the world's leading universities.
Creating Knowledge Together
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Walter Isaacson) — A history of collaborative innovation that challenges individualistic accounts of creativity.
The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea (Helen Lewis) — A corrective to solitary-genius narratives.
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (Howard Rheingold) — An exploration of how new intellectual tools can expand participation in knowledge creation, especially for young people.
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software [(Nadia Eghbal (Asparouhova)] — An ethnography of how online communities sustain ambitious collaborative projects—and the challenges of keeping those communities healthy over time.
How Do We Know What's True?
The Demon-Haunted World (Carl Sagan) — A passionate defense of skepticism, curiosity, and evidence-based thinking in an age of misinformation.
Exhalation (Ted Chiang) — Particularly the story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling," which invites readers to ponder how technologies—from writing to AI—change the way we remember, reason, and understand truth.
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't (Julia Galef) — A contrast between the scout mindset (seeing reality as it truly is) and the soldier mindset (seeing only what we want to see).
The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (David Deutsch) — An ode to human progress through the search for better explanations.
Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World (Tom Chivers) — An introduction to how Bayesian thinking helps us update our beliefs and make decisions under uncertainty.
Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science (Ian M. Church and Peter L. Smuelson) — A breakdown of the virtue of intellectual humility and how we can take our beliefs seriously without becoming captive to them.
Questions? hello@opensciencechallenge.org