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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Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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Chief Economist, Big Think
I’m writing this blog post from tens of thousands of feet above the midwestern United States, on an airline that I won’t name here. The flight got off to a rocky start, and before we left the airport I had lodged a complaint with the airline via Twitter and its website. Should I be rewarded ...
Failing is cool. Failing is great. Failing is the best thing you can do. A fetish for failure has been sweeping the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, and the broader market for ideas for a couple of years now. It’s ridiculous, and here’s why. Thought leaders, social innovators, and TED talkers ...
Macroeconomics is not as young a field as you might believe. Even in Roman times, emperors used monetary policy to influence credit, prices, and demand. Yet for all humanity’s experience, we still make huge blunders. Why? The reason has to do with the inexactitude of macroeconomics. Unlike ...
There’s an old joke about a government project to find the answer to that great mathematical conundrum, 2 + 2 = ? When the economist gets his turn to answer, he whispers in the ear of the bureaucrat overseeing the project, “What do you want it to equal?” Social scientists have an unsavory ...
(Caution – this piece is wonkish.) An interesting aspect of the Oregon Health Study, which I wrote about a little while ago, is that it uses the “intent to treat” format of a randomized controlled trial. In this kind of study, the control group and treatment group are still randomized. The ...