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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Everyone's got an opinion about economics. In the punditocracy, in the blogosphere. Wherever you look you see differing views about how we really ought to approach economic policy. The problem, as Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman points out in the video below, is that "it's getting ...
Facebook has made some decisions about its rules, its internal rules, that sometimes play out quite negatively for activists. For instance, Facebook has a policy that requires people to use their real name and so even though a lot of activists in a lot of countries are using Facebook to organize ...
What's the Latest Development? Asimov's Three Laws be damned: On Tuesday New York-based Human Rights Watch launched a campaign seeking to stop the development of "killer robots" and other artificially intelligent weapons. The organization is putting together a coalition of groups from around the ...
What's the Latest Development? With air pollution levels in Beijing and other major Chinese cities at record highs in the last few months, parents and others are finding themselves consumed with anxiety over the health of their children. Some are choosing schools based on the level of built-in ...
What's the Latest Development? On Sunday, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen A. Schwartzman announced the creation of a $300 million scholarship program that over the next 50 years will send 10,000 students to China's Tsinghua University for one all-expenses-paid year of graduate study. Beginning in ...
What's the Latest Development? Videos released Thursday that clearly showed two men suspected of carrying out Monday's Boston Marathon bombing -- one of whom is on the run as of this posting -- are, according to writer Farhad Manjoo, "a sign of the virtues of video surveillance." He argues that ...
As Yogi Berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. But I think we're going away from the kind of economy in which wheeling and dealing on Wall Street is sort of the pinnacle to something that is much more broad-based. I have pet theory, which is only a pet theory, but it ...
What's the Latest Development? With two major global events coming up -- the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics -- now sounds like a good time for the Brazilian government to announce a startup accelerator program. The country's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation is offering ...
In the Chinese Zodiac, the snake is a mythical creature that symbolizes academia, wisdom, and the pursuit of knowledge. What better year than this to talk about the coming expansion of Chinese thought and the rise of China's terminologies. Language Imperialism What's the big idea? China is little ...
Now that the two suspects Monday’s horrific bombing have been identified, attention turns to their motive. Why would two brothers originally from the troubled region of Chechnya, a republic of Russia, detonate bombs in Boston on Patriot's Day? Here is a very raw, very quick, very preliminary ...
What's the Latest Development? According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, military spending around the world totaled $1.75 trillion in 2012, a 0.5 percent drop from the previous year. Although small, it represents the first real decrease since 1998, and it was largely due ...
What's the Latest Development? A study released by University of Connecticut researchers suggests that American parents' heavy focus on mental enrichment is behind their tendency to label their children as "intelligent" more frequently than "happy" or "easy". The latter were among the top labels ...
Just how healthy is the American economy? There’s little doubt that it’s healthier than the euro zone, which seems to spawn a new fiscal or banking crisis every week. But with unemployment still above 7 percent, nobody in the United States is celebrating a revival yet. Could one still be on the way ...
Julian Assange had a lot of time on his hands while being holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. So the Wikileaks founder did what he does best: he prepared classified material for release. "With nothing to do but work on WikiLeaks material," as his mother put it, Assange spent his time ...
I think we would like our friends outside of Afghanistan to ask why Afghanistan is important to the world and why the world should persist with Afghanistan. And my answer to that is that is if we abandon the myopic, short-term approach to politics in the region, I think Afghanistan plays a very ...