We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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The Quaker alternative to violent confrontation, speaking truth to power in the business context could involve telling the boss he or she is wrong or owning up to one's own mistakes
The hedge fund industry basically started in 1949 with a guy named A.W. Jones and his ultra-high net worth friends. As it evolved in the ’50s and ‘60s and into the ‘70s, it was primarily for the ultra rich. Most of these guys are fairly reclusive guys that run money. They’re more analytical ...
What's the Big Idea? "You're probably living in an upper middle class bubble if..." A variety of patterns of behavior can be inserted to complete this sentence, such as Downton Abbey watching or the consumption of boutique beer. And yet, even more telling behaviors are the types of activities ...
On Tuesday night at 9:00 EST, President Obama will deliver his fifth State of the Union address, the first of his second term. Coming just a few weeks on the heels of his soaring Second Inaugural, the speech will likely dial down the rhetoric a notch as Obama outlines his legislative priorities for ...
Editors' Note: On New Year's Day, 2013, protests erupted in China's Guangdong province over government censorship of a newspaper, Southern Weekly. In highly unusual show of resistance, the paper's reporters demonstrated in the streets, protesting the rewriting of a New Year's editorial by the ...