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

Stephen Walt: I do occasionally worry about the academic world, or at least parts of the academic world being really mired in what some friends of mine and I tend to call the “cult of irrelevance” – this idea of wanting to work on topics that are of great interest to you, and three of your friends, and two people at another university. And I think this is an abdication of our responsibility as intellectuals. We should be grappling with really big questions as much as we can, and questions that are of great importance. That’s why society allows us to have these very privileged positions as intellectuals, or college professors or whatever. And the way we should be paying society back is by using that to try and make the human condition better. Now we’re not all going to agree, but that’s okay because we’re more likely to collectively reach a wise position if we all think hard and then argue about it, and do so in public whenever possible.

Recorded on: 10/8/07