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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Assuming you believe in heaven, who do you think will go there? Mother Teresa? Bill Clinton? You? You might be surprised by the results of a survey that showed that people tend to rate themselves as more likely to get into heaven than anyone else. This self-serving bias Be aware of the fact ...
I think one of the problems I think with a lot of people in high school is that people don’t think of the internet as a real place or a place that has physical consequences in the physical world. This happens with adults who ought to know better too. People stuff online on a whim about what ...
It’s tremendously important that a society have social mobility. That’s more important than its degree of inequality because you can imagine a society in which there was quite a wide distribution of income, a big gap between the top one percent and the bottom one, but high mobility. And you ...
No one ever told me that the place I would choose to live was important. I was fortunate enough to be born in northern New Jersey. I was born in the New York metropolitan area, even though I was working class that gave me a lot of opportunities and stimulation. Someone born in Africa or parts ...
The title of my book Hooked Up: A New Generation's Surprising Take on Sex, Politics and Saving the World has an obvious sexual ambiguity. Young people are not only hooked on the Internet, hooked together by the Internet, but they're hooking up in relationship to find and manage through the Internet ...
You can only dig through the junk on the Web if you have a good general education. One of the problems with education now is I think it's too selective to start with. Getting a background in history, a background in human thought, a background in mathematics, a background in basic science, enables ...
If you look at life satisfaction and what makes people satisfied with their lives, most of it has a lot to do with people’s goals. So when we ask people how important money is to them when they are 18 and we look at their income at age 45, we find that the people that said at age 18 that money didn ...
I personally think that the biggest challenge we face as a society is to find ways to focus on parenting and families. I think we are losing the technologies of social bonding. We are losing the technologies of raising children. We are all so busy. We spend so much time at work. We’re ...
Children’s dreams are a really interesting window into their developing minds. There’s a group of researchers who have done dream research in children which is about as low-tech as it sounds. You put the kids to sleep, and then you come in at various times in the night and you wake them up ...
A tool that everybody should be familiar with and, in fact, people use it all the time, is reductio ad absurdum arguments. It’s the sort of general purpose crowbar of rational argument where you take your opponent's premises and deduce something absurd from them. That is, you deduce a ...
Your planet is a tiny speck in a void of interplanetary space. Your sun is one of a hundred billion other stars in your galaxy. Your galaxy is one of 50 or 100 billion other galaxies in the universe. Does this make you feel enlightened or depressed? "I assert that if you were depressed after ...
What's the Latest Development? Silicon Valley companies of all sizes are increasingly cutting employees' landline cords and exhorting them to use mobile phones and tablets in their stead. Google gave Android smartphones to most of its 53,000 workers, and the 15 staff at Schematic Labs are ...
In the spirit of maintaining an open mind, and in an attempt to purge myself of past prejudices, I will be re-reading The Great Gatsby this weekend. After all, this is the perfect time of year to read Gatsby, as Big Think blogger Andrea Chalupa pointed out in this recent tribute, noting that ...
What's the Latest Development? At the end of the 2013 fall semester, the University of Colorado at Boulder will see its first engineering student graduate from its GoldShirt program, which gives selected students an extra year of preparatory courses before admitting them to the regular ...
What's the Latest Development? A Consumer Reports study revealed that last year, 78 percent of parents helped create their kids' Facebook pages, and 7.5 million users were younger than 13, the minimum age requirement for having an account. Amy Jo Martin, CEO of social media strategy and ...