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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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Unlocking the secrets of your brain
I think almost all strategic problems could at least be improved upon if people would do more careful game theoretic analysis. The reason game theory works in predicting is because people intuit how to behave game theoretically. For example, the United States government probably could be more ...
There are two reasons that I can think of immediately for why Shakespeare is extremely malleable, not just malleable as an ideological tool, but malleable in every way aesthetically and ethically. The first is that he wanted it that way. He seems to have understood very, very early on in his ...
One of the traits that hampers executives and leaders in many realms is over-confidence. And so 95 percent of college professors think they have above-average teaching skills. And Time magazine asked Americans, are you in the top one percent of earners? And 19 percent of Americans believe they ...
One of the things that has been going on in contemporary physics for the last really 15 or 20 years is that physicists seem to be in some sense trying to present an alternative to God. We all know Stephen Hawking’s famous line from the end of A Brief History of Time that when we know this theory ...
I think that this is a very exciting time to be studying human nature. Often people say it’s exciting because of the tremendous breakthroughs we’re making in understanding the brain and the new technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging. But I disagree with that, that it’s the new ...
I think what we see over and over again with technology is that as it – as a new popular technology begins to be woven into society, woven into our personal lives ever more deeply, we not only change the way we behave or the way we think, but we change what we value about human beings, about ...
The current K through 12 educational system is obviously failing on a bunch of levels. You look at the results. The number one thing is improving the quality of the relationship between the teacher and the student. Now how do you do that? Well, there’s no one quick answer, but obviously the ...
Is innovation best pursued through fear or through long-term thinking? NASA, the government entity responsible for so much U.S. innovation in the 20th century, was a response to fear. The Soviet Union demonstrated it was well ahead of the U.S. in the space race. That is why in today's lesson ...
Alcoholics Anonymous is a perfect example of the Golden Rule of Habit Change. AA was actually created essentially by a group of amateurs who were alcoholics themselves who had no scientific background, whatsoever. And since then, AA has not really changed in 70 years. It’s been sort of frozen in ...
Religion and science speak to two different spheres. Science speaks to understanding the universe in which we live and it doesn’t pass moral judgments in any way. Religion tells you how to structure your life, how to live a moral life, how to interact with members of your family, with other ...
The folks on Reddit don't have a lot of credibility these days, so we tread with caution in sharing this image, which may indeed be a fake. According to one Redditor, the picture, which is of a science quiz called "Dinosaurs: Genesis and the Gospel," was administered at a private religious ...
In an excerpt from Gary Greenberg's book, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, the author argues that psychiatry is out of touch with today's science. He writes: In the four revision of the [American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental ...
Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...
A pet peeve that I have in the context of happiness research is that it’s called happiness research. I think the word "happiness" doesn’t mean all that much because it confounds satisfaction with life with mood. But more importantly, I think the word conveys a frivolous idea of what the social ...
I’m from Cleveland. At the beginning of a downturn in 2008, there were two car dealerships on Mayfield Road. One was Toyota, one was Honda. Business started to deteriorate and one dealership decided to do furloughs. So the salesmen and staff just took that afternoon off a week, unpaid. But ...