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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A Critical Look at the Ideas We Fear Most
Francesca Minerva has been receiving death threats. Did she harm anyone? Did she stab, mutilate, or otherwise physically incite people to violence? No: instead she fulfilled her duty as a medical ethicist, in testing our convictions concerning our treatment of what I’ll call pre-person people (PPP ...
In defence of Alberto Giubilini, Francesca Minerva and the Journal of Medical Ethics, as per the recent publication about killing newborn infants. This essentially is an open letter of solidarity with Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, authors of a new article in the Journal of Medical ...
A recent proposal to remove the heads and legs of chickens may be the best thing we can do for them. If we can reduce our farmed animals to vegetables, we would have made great strides in reducing suffering. That is, if we can remove the functions of the brain that cause animals to suffer during ...
We should never ban any word, no matter how offensive In what must make for the most awkward family gatherings, those who speak the Australian Aboriginal Dyirbal language are forbidden from doing so in the presence of their mother-in-law and certain cousins. Says Steven Pinker, “speakers have to ...
Batman is wrong to be nonlethal in the case of the Joker. This shows we can, in some cases, morally kill someone against his will. I am something of a comic fan. The medium fascinates me - though not so much most of the superhero characters and stories. I am currently writing comics myself ...
Introduction to the 'Killing Ethically' series Killing can be sign of compassion or malice. This means when discussing killing, I will be using the word in a neutral way: it is taking an action (often deliberately) to end the life of a biological organism. This means we kill plants and people ...
Twin Brothers in Almost Lifelong Relationship Though I don't read "Dear Prudence" letters, I was struck by a recent headline on Slate (which I do read). 'Brotherly Love: My twin and I share an earth-shattering secret that could devastate our family—should we reveal it?' Here is a clear example ...
In Defence of Hamza Kashgari The chalk outline of societal protection is increasingly being coloured in by personal offense and we’re left with a corpse called justice. Yet, whatever name we give the gallows, call it tolerance or relativism, necks are shattered and lives are lost because tongues ...
Last time, in the introductory post, I suggested that evidence is more important than outrage. Outrage indicates how outraged individuals want the world to be; evidence tells everyone how the world is. Too often, we let outrage guide us; for too long, we let positions with negative social ...
What happens when scientific investigation gives us a conclusion we do not like, for example: prayer does not physically heal anyone (or else makes things worse for the patient being prayed for), homeopathy’s only effect is to pay a charlatan, and “Mother” Earth is finding smarter ways to kill us ...