Big Think Expert Ideas

Testing Our Moral Convictions: Decriminalising Possessing Child Porn To Reduce Child Crime

Tauriq Moosa — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:27:56 -0500

Last time, in the introductory post, I suggested that evidence is more important than outrage. Outrage indicates how outraged individuals want the world to be; evidence tells everyone how the world is. Too often, we let outrage guide us; for too long, we let positions with negative social ...

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Lessons To Learn From China's Not-So-Big Spenders

An Phung — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

What is the Big Idea? In a recent trip to a Costco in Manhattan, shoppers were seen pushing around large shopping carts filled with items like family-sized jars of mayonnaise and bulging packs of fluffy, colorful tube socks. Moms navigated congested aisles with their screaming children and ...

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Globalization Fears That Drive Political Discourse

An Phung — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

What is the Big Idea? The backlash against U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra’s political attack ad is coming from all sides, including those in his own party. For those who missed it, the ad slams incumbent Senator Debbie Stabenow’s foreign economic policies and depicts a young Asian ...

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Your Brain is Automatic. You Are Free.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, argues, "We can understand brains to the nth degree, but that's not going to in any way interfere with the fact that taking responsibility in a social network is done at a social level. So the way I sum it up is ...

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Brains Are Automatic, But People Are Free

Megan Erickson — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

What's the Big Idea? Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world's leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it ...

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The Crazy Cat Lady, Explained

Daniel Honan — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:00:00 -0500

Why do people hoard pets? Psychologists have explained the phenomenon as arising from early childhood experiences. Animals are often stable fixtures in an otherwise dysfunctional life. Yet what if your cat makes you even more dysfunctional? An evolutionary biologist named Jaroslav Flegr argues ...

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The Contraceptive Clash: Not About Religious Rights

Steven Mazie — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In the continuing flap over the Obama administration’s decision to require Catholic institutions to provide birth control under the new health care law, both sides have failed to come to grips with the complexities of religious liberty. In the weeks since the mandate was announced in January ...

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Clean Water is the Best Prophylactic

Daniel Honan — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

"The most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor," Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler observe in their recent book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think . Demographers have found alarming birth rates in the developing world, and it is linked to what Diamandis and Kotler call the ...

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Is Kim Jong-un Dead?

An Phung — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:21:23 -0500

On China's microblogging site Weibo, rumors of Kim Jong-un's death surfaced earlier today when bloggers posted that he was assassinated in Beijing. Media outlets have yet to issue any official reports, but the rumors have spread to Twitter and they are ripe for punny jokes. Gawker was one of the ...

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FU Asks: Should the Government Fund the Arts?

Cody Adams — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:00:00 -0500

Welcome to a new feature on the Floating University blog, FU Asks, where we open up the academic debate on our e-learning platform to the Big Think community. This week we're featuring a discussion prompt from Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and conductor of the American Symphony ...

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Should Government Support the Arts?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:00:00 -0500

Reading List for Course on Science and Environmental Communication

Matthew C. Nisbet — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:32:37 -0500

This semester, students from a diversity of majors at American University are participating in an advanced seminar I am teaching on science and environmental communication. For the first part of the semester, we are covering core issues and themes. In the process, students will be blogging on ...

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Launching a Democratization of Data Science

Stephen Wolfram — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:05:29 -0500

It’s a sad but true fact that most data that’s generated or collected—even with considerable effort—never gets any kind of serious analysis. But in a sense that’s not surprising. Because doing data science has always been hard. And even expert data scientists usually have to spend lots of time ...

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A Renaissance Education, Now Available in Your Netflix Queue

Daniel Honan — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

If every student in the world had to take one required course, I would argue that course should be on classic Italian cinema. By that I mean the cinema of Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone and many ...

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A Renaissance Education in Your Netflix Queue

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:12:55 -0500

Just as the birth of Goethe's aesthetic is steeped in his encounter with Rome, Martin Scorsese experienced Italy through the tourist's gaze, which informed his art. That is why watching his film "My Voyage to Italy" is a lot like spending a junior year abroad, or better yet, like going to film ...

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Liberal Education vs. Killing Time

Peter Lawler — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:48:19 -0500

So I’ve gotten too many enthusiastic and too many critical emails about my recent “Liberal Education” post for the wrong reasons. It was critical, of course, with the general approach to education these days. But it wasn’t about “general education” in the sense of the courses any particular ...

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Evidence is More Important Than Outrage: An Introduction

Tauriq Moosa — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:46:25 -0500

What happens when scientific investigation gives us a conclusion we do not like, for example: prayer does not physically heal anyone (or else makes things worse for the patient being prayed for), homeopathy’s only effect is to pay a charlatan, and “Mother” Earth is finding smarter ways to kill us ...

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This Super Camera Captures What's Beyond Human Comprehension

Michio Kaku — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:47:32 -0500

Every Wednesday, Michio Kaku will be answering reader questions about physics and futuristic science. If you have a question for Dr. Kaku, just post it in the comments section below and check back on Wednesdays to see if he answers it. Today, Dr. Kaku addresses this question: MIT researchers ...

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This Super Camera Captures What is Beyond Human Comprehension

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:46:05 -0500

Jason Silva: Transcendant Man

Brian Hoffstein — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Jason Silva is a transcendent man. As a filmmaker, philosopher, and futurist, Silva is always thinking big. Currently in the process of creating a feature length documentary, Silva has released a series of short clips that are attracting attention. The videos are sometimes under 2 minutes long, and ...

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