Founder
As you can imagine this website highly encourages skepticism in all things and that includes questioning why you should pay any attention to what’s on this website. This website is the brainchild of Founder Stan Quinn [Me, the dude writing these words!]. A man of mixed racial and cultural heritage…Native American (Yurok, Karuk and Assiniboine…enrolled with the Karuk Tribe), Irish, and English. A Stanford graduate with a Bachelor of Science degree in Symbolic Systems. Closely related to Cognitive Science the major is an interdisciplinary degree including Computer Science, Psychology, Linguistics, and Philosophy. I completed the degree with a concentration in Neuroscience where I also studied early Machine Learning with Neural Networks under my mentor Professor David Rumelhart. I like to think my cross-discipline education has given me both a broader and more detailed view then most on how the brain works. I don’t claim scientific rigor for all of my beliefs but I do try to be logical and provide annotations where applicable. I have always had an interest in trying to figure out the how’s and the why’s…from the brain to beliefs to politics…and after years of taking notes and having finally arrived at a somewhat coherent philosophy I thought it was time to put thought into action and build this website which I hope will grow into something much more. The wave of irrationality and the rise of the ideocracy have shown me there is an urgent need for The Rational Foundation which I hope will be many things…a blog, a forum, a way to share ideas and encourage critical thinking with a heartfelt effort to counter disinformation and give people valuable tools that will help them filter the sometimes overwhelming amount of information they are exposed to and make better decisions about those beliefs.
The Dream
The dream is simple…promote rationality and perhaps create the foundations for a new Religion based on Science. The dream was born from my search for meaning in college and the many notes and thoughts that have formed into a hopefully intelligible rational philosophy. I’m working on putting it all into book form and leaving a legacy…trying to leave the world in a better place then I found it. What fuels me now is the pervading lack of rationality in our lives and especially in politics. I just want policies to be based on the data, to rely on what we have learned and base our policies on a balance between long term goals and short term goals that make us a better more sustainable country and species. In many ways I hope this website is an answer to the growing disinterest people have in politics and have with current religions…humanity seems to have an innate need for meaning…but why should we base our ideas and policies on thousand year old values that make very little sense in the modern world. If you want things to improve in a country, improve the educational system…improve the candidates you vote for, support candidates that will reduce term limits, improve transparency and support accountability and watchdog agencies in government, the military and the corporate world, and of course base policies on actual data and support research into gathering new data on which to base our policies. We need to strengthen empathy and encourage diversity with things like mandatory military service or community service. Encourage people to get outside their bubble with pen pals and sister cities, foreign exchange students, learning history from sources and not just biased interpretations. You can be distrustful of science…I wholeheartedly support skepticism, but believe in the principles of good science and that bad science doesn’t last. Part of being human is learning that we are all biased and that we have to continually fight against it…to learn more and be the best citizens, the best parents, the best human beings we can if we want to survive and thrive as a species. Obviously a lot of these ideas need more unpacking which I hope to do in more articles, blogs and as I said, eventually a book.