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

Question:

Transcript: I can’t . . . I don’t think that there is a single person who I would identify. I think there are many people whose ideas in various areas of human endeavor who I really admire. I would say one of them is Kwame Anthony Appiah, who is a faculty member at Princeton who has written, I think, quite brilliantly about an issue that I think is extraordinarily important, which is the nature of identity and how we translate our national identities, our ethnic identities, our religious identities into living in a cosmopolitan world. So there is something who is a philosopher and who I greatly admire.