Manifesto v0.1 – May 2026
Process note: how this manifesto emerged through experience, reading, reflection, and collaboration with AI.
OSC is an experiment, and this manifesto should be read in that spirit. Many of the ideas here are still evolving. We expect the project to change through iteration, dialogue, and experience.
Contents:
When Inquiry Becomes Performance
Many ambitious students sincerely love learning, mastery, and intellectual challenges. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do difficult things well. Human beings naturally take pleasure in competence, achievement, and growth.
But the systems surrounding ambitious students—grades, college admissions, competitions, extracurricular activities, and online cultures—can subtly reshape how students experience inquiry (meaning the quest for truth, information, or knowledge). These systems can discourage students from asking questions whose answers they don’t already know, testing ideas that might fail, following curiosity without a guaranteed payoff, revising beliefs in light of new evidence, and grappling playfully with ambiguity and uncertainty. Practically, this might look like: shaping a science-fair presentation around what appears impressive, avoiding posing risky questions in class because you worry about seeming “dumb,” massaging an essay into a clean story when you still have doubts about it, choosing “safe” project topics, or writing and saying things to get the best reactions from teachers or admissions officers.
Over time, inquiry drifts from play to managing a personal brand. Many students learn to optimize not primarily for understanding, but for polished performance through high-status activities, strategic résumé curation, external validation, prestige signaling, and the appearance of intellectual sophistication. These pressures do not originate from any single institution or actor; they emerge gradually from the broader culture of achievement that surrounds ambitious young people.
The drive to perform is not entirely irrational. Students today navigate truly high-stakes environments shaped by grades, college admissions, scholarships, job markets, and social comparison. Under those conditions, caution often becomes adaptive. Intellectual risk-taking can begin to feel dangerous rather than exciting.
Herein lies the challenge: genuine, fulfilling inquiry requires room for uncertainty, confusion, revision, and partial understanding. It often involves dead ends, awkward first attempts, and the possibility of being wrong. But many students learn that impressing others is safer than openly grappling with what they do not yet comprehend.
The result is not necessarily laziness or anti-intellectualism. In fact, many high-achieving students work diligently even to the point of burnout. The deeper problem is that achievement can slowly engulf inquiry entirely, alienating students from their craft. The work can become more about show than intellectual ownership, more about optimization than understanding.
This tension is not new, but powerful AI technologies intensify it. Today, smooth writing, sophisticated summaries, and elegant code abound. As impressive performance becomes easier to simulate, the relationship between outward achievement and inward understanding grows murkier. Students can produce sleek outputs without experiencing the slow, messy process of intellectual transformation that traditionally accompanied them.
Under these conditions, the central educational scarcity may no longer be access to information or technical fluency. Instead, the scarcest entities may be judgment, curiosity, sustained attention, uncertainty tolerance, and intellectual ownership—the ability to genuinely wrestle with ideas rather than merely assemble glossy artifacts around them.
OSC begins from the belief that these capacities matter deeply. This is not because we reject achievement, ambition, or technology. On the contrary, difficult intellectual work can be profoundly satisfying by virtue of the public mastery and recognition that often accompany it. However, we believe that the satisfaction from stretching one’s cognitive abilities should not wholly depend on the approval of others.
OSC exists in part because ambitious students deserve spaces where inquiry itself—not merely the appearance of inquiry—remains socially and intellectually meaningful.
Inquiry Requires Different Conditions
OSC draws inspiration from the open-science movement. Over the past several decades, researchers across many disciplines have become more concerned with the accessibility and credibility of scientific insights. In response, they have developed new practices intended to make research more honest and accountable. These efforts have included everything from data sharing and preregistration to large-scale replication projects.
To outside observers, these developments can appear highly technical, but the fundamental lesson of the open-science movement is not technical; it is cultural. At its core, open science rests on the principle that knowledge improves when people make their reasoning visible, expose their claims to scrutiny, and remain willing to revise their views in light of new evidence. The goal is not to eliminate mistakes; mistakes are inevitable. Rather, the goal is to create norms and institutions that help people discover mistakes, learn from them, and gradually move closer to the truth.
Many of the habits associated with open science emerged in response to the basic reality that human beings are remarkably susceptible to fooling themselves. We attach to our preconceptions, notice evidence that supports what we already believe, and overlook weaknesses in our own arguments more easily than we overlook them in the arguments of others. Intellectual humility—the ability to recognize the limits of one's knowledge without surrendering confidence altogether—does not come naturally; it must be cultivated.
Transparency, replication, verification, and reproducibility are not merely technical procedures. They are cultural tools designed to help people distinguish what they hope is true from what the evidence actually supports. As Carl Sagan observed, the method of science may be even more important than its findings.
For this reason, OSC is less interested in teaching students the full technical machinery of contemporary research than in introducing them to the culture that motivates it. Participants are not expected to master preregistration, sensitivity analysis, or advanced replication techniques. Nor is OSC trying to turn teenagers into miniature professional researchers. Instead, we hope to offer an early encounter with some of the norms that make inquiry productive and trustworthy: asking clear questions, documenting uncertainty, welcoming criticism, revising claims, and treating evidence as an opportunity to learn rather than merely a tool for persuasion.
Some forms of inquiry receive more attention than others. Bold claims, surprising discoveries, and dramatic breakthroughs often attract the spotlight. Yet many of the most important advances in knowledge emerge from less celebrated activities: careful observation, verification, replication, measurement, and the patient work of determining whether a result actually holds up. Sometimes progress comes not from discovering something entirely new but from learning that a medical treatment is less effective than previously believed, that a government program fails to achieve its intended goals, or that a widely accepted claim rests on feebler evidence than researchers once assumed.
Open science invites us to see the hidden glamour in this process. There is something deeply satisfying about uncovering an error, resolving an ambiguity, improving a measurement, or discovering that a widely accepted claim is weaker—or stronger—than previously believed. The pursuit of truth depends not only on generating novel ideas but also on rigorously testing them. Learning how to check whether something is actually true may be one of the most important intellectual habits of all.
The stakes of these practices extend beyond academia. Research influences health interventions, public policies, charitable giving, and emerging technologies. When results are unreliable, the costs are often borne far beyond the communities that produced them. Conversely, societies progress when they develop institutions capable of generating more credible findings and correcting mistakes over time.
Transparency and self-correction are therefore not merely scientific virtues; they are civic and even existential ones. Students who eventually pursue careers in research will encounter these norms throughout their training. OSC aims to provide an early introduction—not only to the technical aspects of cutting-edge research, but also to the responsibilities and enrichment opportunities that accompany them.
The AI Era Changes the Stakes
The open-science movement did not invent curiosity, skepticism, transparency, or intellectual humility. These values have long been central to the pursuit of knowledge. What is new is the environment in which these values are being tested.
Recent advances in AI have lowered many barriers to inquiry. Motivated students can now pursue projects that would previously have required far more specialized training or institutional support. A student designing a water-quality study can learn unfamiliar chemistry, identify relevant literature, generate code, and rapidly test alternative approaches. A student interested in political polarization can analyze survey data, investigate competing explanations, and engage with debates that were once largely confined to universities and research institutes. Similar possibilities are emerging across many domains of inquiry.
This may prove especially significant for young people. Periods of technological change sometimes create opportunities for talented newcomers to contribute before expertise concentrates behind more established institutions and professional pathways. The early history of computing offers many examples. AI may not eliminate the value of expertise, but it may allow students to participate in ambitious forms of inquiry earlier than would previously have been possible.
AI lowers some barriers to inquiry while raising the standards for intellectual ownership. The locus of difficulty shifts. When sophisticated outputs become easier to generate, the most important judgments become harder and more interesting. Which ideas are worth pursuing? Which explanations are convincing? Which findings are robust? Which ideas have you genuinely made your own?
Thinking clearly about these issues becomes difficult if we assume that ideas can always be neatly classified as either "human-generated" or "AI-generated." The history of inquiry has never worked quite that way. Ideas emerge through conversation, criticism, mentorship, reading, collaboration, and revision. Increasingly, they may emerge through interactions with AI systems as well.
Rather than viewing this solely as a problem, OSC regards it as one of the most fascinating intellectual developments of our time. New forms of collaboration are emerging between people and machines, and their implications remain uncertain. Yet they also expand opportunities for exploration, creativity, and productivity that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.
The task is not to enforce a sharp boundary between human and machine contributions. It is to understand how human judgment, curiosity, and intellectual growth can flourish within these new forms of collaboration.
Much of the educational establishment is understandably preoccupied with determining what students can accomplish without AI. OSC is oriented toward a different challenge: how students can learn to collaborate with powerful intellectual tools while remaining active participants in advancing knowledge. Did the student help shape the inquiry? Did they make meaningful decisions about how to investigate it? Did they revise their thinking in response to evidence? Did the process leave them with a deeper understanding than they possessed at the outset?
These considerations point toward a broader idea that will play an important role in OSC: intellectual ownership. Intellectual ownership is not the absence of assistance. It is the presence of meaningful engagement in a project. OSC is less interested in who or what originated an idea than in how someone participated in its development.
This is one reason OSC places substantial value on process. A polished final product often reveals surprisingly little about how an investigation unfolded. Documentation, reflection, and discussion can illuminate the choices, revisions, productive failures, and discoveries that occurred along the way.
Here the challenge of intellectual ownership intersects with the culture of open science. Open science encourages researchers to make their process more visible so that others can understand, evaluate, and build upon their work. In an AI-rich world, process documentation serves an additional purpose: it helps reveal how human understanding developed, how judgments were made, and how an inquiry evolved over time.
The rise of AI only raises the importance of transparency, verification, and intellectual humility. OSC is motivated in part by the belief that this moment creates new opportunities for ambitious inquiry. The goal is not to preserve a pre-AI learning environment. It is to explore what rigorous inquiry might look like in a world with AI.
What OSC Is Trying to Build
Imagine a student who becomes curious about something. Maybe they want to know whether a local river is becoming more polluted. Maybe they want to understand why political polarization has increased. Maybe they want to replicate a psychology experiment, investigate a historical claim, analyze a public dataset, or evaluate the effectiveness of a policy in another country.
Today, there are many ways to learn about these topics. There are far fewer occasions to investigate them seriously, document the process, share the results, and receive thoughtful engagement from others. OSC is an attempt to create such an opportunity.
Participants pursue questions that genuinely interest them. They track their steps, share what they discover, and make their work available for others to learn from. Some projects will produce compelling findings. Others will lead to null results, revised assumptions, or entirely new directions. All of these outcomes can be valuable.
The aim is not merely to collect projects but to make inquiry more visible. Too often, intellectual work is encountered only in its finished form. We see the polished essay, the final report, the published paper, or the successful experiment. The false starts, abandoned ideas, mistaken assumptions, and revisions usually remain hidden.
This is understandable. Exposing uncertainty can feel risky, especially for ambitious students. Many learn early that it is safer to appear knowledgeable than to publicly reveal confusion, mistakes, or changing beliefs.
OSC encourages a different set of norms. When participants document revisions, acknowledge mistakes, and explain how their thinking evolved, they make it easier for others to do the same. Transparency becomes less unusual. Intellectual risk-taking becomes less intimidating. More of the process becomes available for others to learn from.
Over time, individual investigations can also become connected. A student replicates a study. Another adapts the method to a different question. Someone else notices a limitation and proposes an improvement. Participants may never meet one another in person and may investigate entirely different subjects, yet they can still learn from one another's reasoning, methods, successes, stumbles, and epiphanies.
These perspectives also shape how OSC thinks about recognition. Recognition is not only a matter of prizes, rankings, or formal distinctions. It is also a matter of having one's work taken seriously in a community of people invested in one another. Thoughtful feedback, idea sharing, and the knowledge that others have learned from one's work can be powerful forms of recognition in their own right. Achievement still matters. Human beings naturally enjoy mastery, accomplishment, challenge, and the satisfaction of difficult work. OSC does not seek to eliminate these motivations. It seeks to direct them toward the activities that make inquiry possible and enriching.
OSC will undoubtedly evolve. New practices, traditions, and forms of participation will emerge over time. The institution will be shaped not only by its founders but also by the people who choose to participate in it.
An Invitation
Seeking truth can be a frustrating activity. It frequently entails confusion, false starts, and long stretches without clear answers. Not everyone finds that appealing.
Some people, however, want to search deeper. They encounter a claim and wonder whether it is actually true. They notice something puzzling and start hunting for explanations. They become obsessed with a topic and discover that reading about it is no longer enough—they want to investigate it for themselves. If that sounds familiar, OSC may be worth exploring.
You do not need to be an expert. You do not need access to a laboratory, advanced coursework, or specialized credentials. You do not need to know exactly where an investigation will lead.
What helps is curiosity, persistence, and a willingness to engage seriously with evidence, ideas, and uncertainty.
The hope behind OSC is that more young people will have chances not only to acquire knowledge, but also to participate in its creation.
Further Reading
This manifesto draws inspiration from many sources. Some are books and essays. Others are communities, institutions, and ongoing conversations. Readers interested in the ideas behind OSC may find the following starting points useful.
Inquiry and Education
“Rethinking High-School Science Fairs” (Leah Libresco Sargeant) — A reimagining of the science fair as a venue for authentic inquiry rather than performative achievement; the original inspiration for many of the ideas behind OSC.
Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic-and What We Can Do About It (Jennifer Breheny Wallace) — An exploration of achievement culture and its consequences for young people.
Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (William Deresiewicz) — A critique of elite educational systems and their tendency to reward achievement while neglecting intellectual independence and purpose.
“Restoring Science to Science Education” (Bruce Alberts) — A case for engaging students in the practices of scientific inquiry rather than primarily teaching established scientific facts.
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl) — A compelling argument that children learn much like scientists: by exploring, testing ideas, and revising their understanding of the world.
Open Science and Research Credibility
The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice (Chris Chambers) — A critique of the incentives and norms that can undermine scientific inquiry, and a case for greater transparency, rigor, and intellectual honesty.
Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research: How to Do Open Science (Garret Christensen, Jeremy Freese, and Edward Miguel) — A practical introduction to open-science research practices.
“A Manifesto for Reproducible Science” (Marcus R. Munafò et al.) — A concise overview of the reproducibility movement and the reforms it proposes for scientific research.
Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) — Resources, training, and events dedicated to improving the credibility and transparency of research.
Center for Open Science — An organization dedicated to making research more transparent, accessible, and trustworthy.
Collaboration, Communities, and Knowledge Creation
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 and discovery.
The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea (Helen Lewis) — A critique of solitary-genius narratives and an exploration of the social and collaborative nature of creativity and achievement.
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) — An examination of how online communities, open collaboration, and public work create new avenues for learning and contribution.
Questions? hello@opensciencechallenge.org