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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Are the financial markets rational? It's a tough claim to make as share prices and bond yields zoom up and down during a single day, hour, or even second, sometimes without any obvious reasons. Yet for the first time in human history, the markets may be approaching the ideal of rationality that ...
Remember the 1960s? It was a decade so radical that even the President of the United States could publically declare that public funding of contraceptives would increase economic prosperity. Lyndon Johnson went so far as to say “[L]ess than five dollars invested in population control is worth a ...
Penn Jillette has his vices. Jillette, the speaking side of the comic duo Penn and Teller, lives in sin city, after all, and has had the occasion to gamble on the Vegas strip. When it comes to drugs and alcohol, however, Jillette often speaks about how he has never had "one sip of wine," nor ...
What's the Big Idea? Before neuroscience and quantum physics, there was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The 19th century German idealist revolutionized Western thought, and every great thinker since has been working in his shadow, says Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic ...
Today we're pleased to announce our second Big Think Book of the Month, the dazzlingly ambitious Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism , out May 22, 2012 from Verso Books. Slavoj Žižek has been called "the most dangerous philosopher in the West" for his analysis of ...
Editor's note: The following is an edited excerpt from Slavoj Žižek's book, "Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism." [One of the only schools] of thought that fully accepts the inexistence of the big Other is Buddhism. Is the solution then to be found in Buddhist ...
Due to his argument that income inequalty is a sign that the economy is working, The New York Times called former Bain Capital Managing Director Ed Conard's book, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About The Economy Is Wrong the "most hated book in America." In this far ...
The blind 40-year-old Chinese dissident who escaped from house arrest in April — improbably evading guards, finding his way to the U.S. embassy in Beijing and, after a diplomatic fracas, acquiring a visa to study law in the United States — landed at Newark Liberty airport on Saturday. Less than a ...
What is the Big Idea? Step into a classroom in North Korea and you will find very little that differs from a classroom in New York City - chalkboard, rows of desks, chairs, desktop computers and bulletin boards full of text and pictures. But stay a little longer and you might notice something ...
What is the Big Idea? While Congress dukes it out over the federal interest rates on student loans, venture capitalist Peter Thiel has a solution for college students who don't want to be saddled with huge amounts of debts in an unstable economy. The solution, he says, is to drop out of college ...
What's the Big Idea? David Eagleman's Laboratory for Perception is located on the ground floor of Baylor College of Medicine, but the vibe is more creative think tank than clinical academic enclave. The walls are enamelled in dry-erase paint and marked up with impromptu sketches, arrows, and ...
If you asked me how being a single parent has affected my economic prospects I would have to say for the worse…and for the best. You see, while parenting young children alone may have made everything more difficult (literally, everything) it also gave me an incentive to work hard to give those ...
Class of 2012, you’ve heard it before: you will graduate into a world transformed by the global financial crisis. Unemployment among young people is at its highest rate since WWII, and the average 22-year-old now enters adulthood with $23,000 in debt. The total amount owed by students in the U.S ...
What's the Big Idea? In the world of online dating there are sites for people claiming just about any sort of interest or identity, whether they are a dog lover or a conservative Christian, or even a married person looking to have an affair. That's right, a dating site for married people ...
Big Think hit the streets (the intersection of Wall & Broad, NYC) during the AM rush hour this Friday, May 18th with a guerilla theater piece for Facebook IPO day. It's a funny, poignant clash between worldviews on the cultural and economic implications of the rise of the social web. Facebook's ...