Looking back on Scientific Skepticism
Why a purity movement against false balance is a problem, can be explained by looking back at our parent movement, Scientific Skepticism (I’ll just refer to it as Skepticism from here on to be contrasted with Receptive Skepticism). Skepticism is a purity movement, but that causes problems for its end goals. Establishing purity also provokes the urge to seek out and purge impurity. That puts Skepticism at risk of tribalism and losing sight of the methodological basis by which claims within it are evaluated. Another problem is that Skepticism seems to come across to outsiders like it is conflicting with the values of society. Skepticism leads to confidence, and that confidence is misunderstood as pride and shortsightedness. That is a tragedy, because Skepticism isn’t either at its core design.
But in those circumstances especially, having a purity movement that doesn’t respond well to anything other than what passes its purity test, ultimately encourages society to alienate it as a problem. However, even if Skepticism does respond well, and just firmly asserts that a certain position is wrong, it still comes off as closed-minded. That is because society as a system has adapted to people not being so confident because the approaches normally used don’t justify that kind of confidence. Sure, there are plenty of certain people in society, but they aren’t characterized as open-minded by the rest. So people won’t realize you have a justified confidence, and that on those grounds you as a Skeptic deserve an exemption to have confidence.
But open-mindedness is the core of Skepticism’s reason for accepting science, and rejecting claims and having its stance of confidence on issues. And if impact is to be made, that needs to be the biggest priority in terms of what Skepticism promotes. Yet, the opposite is happening now. Skepticism is very misunderstood. And then other people siding with Skepticism’s conclusions, latch onto Skepticism’s purity features, and don’t really understand the methodology well. They join as defenders of the purity of Skepticism and then appropriate the term for fighting stances conflicting with science.
But Receptive Skepticism is trying to take Skepticism, refine it, and improve it within that refinement, to better precision. That barrier of social misunderstanding about open-mindedness, is targeted within the design of RS. And having an approach to info that is compatible with all intelligence levels, both high and low, is also targeted within the design of RS, because society really needs that more than ever. The ultimate goal of RS is to be a skepticism for everyone. In order to clear up this major point of incompatibility with society, you have to go out of your way to show you are not what they think you seem to be. So that means, not only receptivity, but you need to make room for impurity, so you can work at the root of the problem. If you don’t, people won’t understand the reasons why they or their ideas are being excluded. RS can accomplish this by not being an exclusive group. RS can allow itself to be practiced imperfectly. We need not fear false balance. Because there never can be false balance in the practice of RS. This is because RS will always norm open-mindedness, which will call unjustified beliefs to eventual reconsideration. And that norming will make anything not open-minded, which Skepticism would seek to eliminate, to be seen as being so. Instead of focusing on immediate purity, we promote the core value that leads to purification, so to speak. Promoting the right mindset will better lead people to the most reasonable conclusions when evaluating claims.
And a big issue to keep in mind with RS, is that it is trying to make major social changes. Part of that is helping to recover open-mindedness as a principle that leads to reasonable thinking. In doing that, our stances can be better understood. As said in the Technical Case, when we are open to the absurd, we model openness to absurdity as a way for others to do things. And that openness to absurdity is important, because we have many people dismissing things that are incredibly justified, and substantiated, as being absurd. And intelligence and knowledge factors in. People have different levels of understanding, and the less understanding people have, the more absurd true things can appear to be. Considering that 49.99% of the population is below average, and around 80% are unable to break past conventional reasoning, we can’t be norming dismissal of ideas.
We can’t be modeling that. We need to model something that will work on all levels of society, open-mindedness. So getting people to stop dismissing the absurd has to be modeled for them in a way that entices. We want to raise awareness that we can’t get society to become more open-minded if we function like a purity movement. So instead of holding people to skeptical purity, what we hold people to is open-mindedness. In doing that, good science gets a fair hearing, both fairly quickly, and in the long-term, in our society.
Source: te