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The longstanding goal for the project was met when we incorporated as a nonprofit.  Our new goal is to promote receptive skepticism, endurance-based dispute, science and open-mindedness, while opposing scorn and “selective considering” of ideas.

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RS is needed as a new skepticism because there needs to be a skepticism for everyone, where people from different backgrounds can come to us, and learn about us and come away feeling good about it.  But also, we need to get scorn-aversion normed worldwide, because it can likely lead to better outcomes.  More:

Scientific Skepticism is not meant to speak to knowledge as a whole. It’s a pragmatic philosophy. Receptive Skepticism is justified with epistemology from beginning to end.  Philosophically, this makes the philosophies to be apples and oranges, as the founder of Scientific Skepticism, Kurtz, notes in calling it Selective Skepticism.  Receptive Skepticism, on the other hand, answers the question of why knowledge can be believed and trusted.

This also means that Receptive Skepticism is applicable to any area of thought, and belongs in all areas of life.

But Receptive Skepticism is also different in practice, at a systemic level, because it has more precise inclusion and exclusion criteria.  And we recognize that social systems factors will turn it into its own system.  It also reduces friction and misassociation.  More Info:

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In the Technical Case, scorn is identified via systems-theory, as a positive or negative feedback loop, caused by a root of disgust toward beliefs, conclusions, or behaviors.  The purpose is to ensure the health of everyone in the system and the system itself.  But it runs at an operating cost of massive backfire, and creates many new and terrible problems for society as it is used.

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Scorn even toward the right targets is bad modeling, most people won’t hit the right targets as often as we need for it to not be dysfunctional as a whole.  More people scorn wrong than right enough to cause too much damage.   Scorn is destructive, and it is used to treat things it mostly created in the first place.  It creates terrible problems!  See the Technical Case.

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It is better to fix the problem than enjoy the false comfort of feeling like the guilty are punished at its operating cost.  As noted in the Technical Case,  too many people have mistaken the regular or good for horrible, scorned,  and then caused untold grief, death, and suffering as a result.

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This is because even intelligent people fall prey to bias, and it is essential to model, because research shows people on the conventional level of moral reasoning, (The level most people are at), identify right and wrong via social dictates.  Flexibility is a sign of higher reasoning, most do not have.  Modeling receptivity, and discouraging the lack of receptivity, better raises the level of open-mindedness.

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As noted in the Technical Case, we likely evolved disgust, for social avoidance of physical contamination, and beyond that level it gets really arbitrary.