What is Big Think?

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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: What is your question?

Michael Sandel: Well here, I suppose, is a question that is . . . that is worth asking . . . worth all of us asking ourselves as citizens in the world as we find it today. And that is, “Does the good life . . . can the good life simply be one that takes place in private life alone – in our own individual lives and those of our families? Or in order to lead a good, and fulfilling, and satisfying life, do we need to cultivate a care for the world, and to try to figure out how to have a hand . . . how to have meaningful say in trying to shape the whole of the common good, or the direction of things beyond our own corner of the world?” I think that is an open question. My own hunch is that the answer to the question – which won’t surprise you – is the second. That the care of the world, and the participation, and the care of the public life larger than ourselves, is an important part of the good life. But you know philosophers for a very long time have disagreed about this and debated about it. So I really take it to be an open question, but an inviting question for . . . that’s . . . but an inviting question that is really very much relevant to the lives we live and the world that we face today.

Recorded on: 6/12/07