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.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Chief Economist, Big Think
(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 ...
Two years ago Big Think Chief Economist Daniel Altman published a book called Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy . Altman offered predictions for what the global economy would look like 10, 20, 40 years down the road. In the video below ...
This week the New England Journal of Medicine published new results from the Oregon Health Study, which randomly selected people for extensions of Medicaid coverage. To anyone who has studied expansions of health coverage in other countries, the results will not have come as a surprise. They may ...
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 ...
There’s been a lot of discussion in the past couple of weeks about Bitcoin, the online virtual currency whose value has been extraordinarily volatile of late. A currency that’s electronic but as untraceable as cash surely has its uses for some people, but there’s one aspect of it that hasn’t been ...