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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Why our fears don’t match the facts
You and I make risk judgments for ourselves all the time, based on a few facts and a lot of subjective, instinctive emotional factors. As a result we sometimes worry more than the evidence says we need to, or less that the evidence says we should, and that Risk Perception Gap, as I call ...
The EDGE.com Big Question this year was, “What ‘should’ we be worried about?” 155 selected “…scientists, artists, philosophers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who are at the center of today's intellectual, technological, and scientific landscape…” were asked for their thoughts, in the ...
Humans are blessed, and cursed, with a risk perception system that mostly gets things right, but sometimes creates what I call a Risk Perception Gap, when we worry more than the evidence warrants, or less than the evidence warns. Such seemingly irrational fears, which produce all sorts of ...
Have you read the 2008 Supreme Court decision that gives all Americans the right to own guns? Probably not. I hadn’t, until the other day, when I was stunned to find that the decision is hardly the blanket protection for gun ownership that the National Rifle Association and adamant gun ...
Here’s something worrying. People are worried. A survey taken in December found that increasing numbers of people are pessimistic about the future. 44% said they were fearful about what “the new year holds in store” for them personally, and 56% were fearful for what lies ahead for the ...
I write here about the Risk Perception Gap, when we worry too much about smaller risks and not enough about bigger ones. More than just an interesting example of how human cognition isn’t nearly as ‘rational’ as we’d like to believe, the Risk Perception Gap is a serious risk in and of ...
You may have missed it, but on the Friday heading into the Christmas holiday, the FDA announced its decision about the safety of salmon genetically engineered to grow faster. After reviewing more than a decade of research, the FDA says the fish are A) safe for human consumption and B) would have ...
You know that supposed ‘debate’ about climate change? It sure isn’t about the science. A review by Dr. James Powell , a former member of the National Science Board (under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush) of all the scientific papers on climate change published in peer-reviewed journals ...
In the passionate response to the horror of murdered children, much has been written and said about guns, and the need for gun control. Much of it misses the mark, focusing on the danger of guns as weapons, but not their meaning as symbols. Until we examine what guns represent, and why ...
Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic. Nicola Abbagnano (1901-1990) Italian existential philosopher The human mind can achieve fantastic things. One of them is “…our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance ...
In case you haven’t heard, the world may end soon. Very soon. On December 21st at midnight, in fact, the last date on the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Tosh, you say. Just more whacky apocalyptophobia. Well, should we survive this latest Doomsday, in ten days we will only have made it to a new ...
Let’s say you are told that somewhere ahead, in the direction you are walking, is a cliff. If you keep walking, you will get there fairly soon. Scared? Probably not. After all, you know you can stop before you get too close to the edge. Let’s say you are also told that when you get to the cliff ...
If you devote the patience necessary to finish this short post, you will end up a better decision maker. But then, as you will discover in the paragraphs below, if you have that sort of patience, you are probably a better decision maker already. We begin with a quiz, consisting ...
So you think you’re pretty smart, huh? Intelligent. Able to think critically, to reason, to weigh all the evidence and come up with the right answer and know what’s true. HAH, I say! Such hubris flies in the face of overwhelming evidence that the brain is only the organ with which we think we ...
Oh, the swell of hope. The hope that the bipartisanship so critical to progress might somehow arise from the post-election ashes of a rancorous and divisive national election. The hope that comes from the rejection of loathsome remarks about rape, (Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock both lost ...