What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

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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Transcript

Neiman: I was a tail end of the ‘60s kid. I dropped out of high school as a matter of fact and- ‘cause I didn’t want to miss what was going on. I went on the road and did all the sorts of things that people did back then from Woodstock to the moratoriums against the Viet Nam War and it all collapsed pretty much at a certain point in this country anyway in ’72, ’73. And I don’t mean to say that I was theoretically caught up in the ‘60s. I wasn’t-- I was a kid. It’s not like I had seriously read Mancuso[ph?] or anything but it did seem time to think about what had gone wrong and where my life was going to go, and I just happened by good fortune or not to read a little Nietzsche and a little Sartre and I decided this is where the answers are; I want to become a philosopher. It was a long road from there to where I am now but that was what got me started.

Question: Who has influenced your life the most?

Neiman: That’s a hard question to answer because I always considered myself lucky to have had just in philosophy five really powerful teachers, two in Berlin and three at Harvard, but not any one of them. I think if I had simply been influenced by one of them I would be less independent than I am now so there isn’t simply one person whom I can name. I was a student at Harvard of John Rawls, Stanley Cavell and Burton Dreben. In Berlin I was a student of Yackel Talbis[ph?] and Margarita Funbantano[ph?] who aren’t known over here but again I benefited tremendously by being able to be around almost a surfeit of first-rate minds and take bits from all of them.