We all love to criticize. Unfortunately, we also hate being criticized. That leads to a happiness problem in the giant, constant, panoramic review that is the experience of modern life. We post and comment on others with abandon, but feel aggrieved at the way others assess us, both online and in person. The world seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Fortunately, though, each of us can change how we give and take criticism, in ways that will make us less likely to harm others, more immune to taking offense, and better able to benefit from feedback — even when it is negative.
Just as important for getting along with others is the ability to give compliments. The quality of our relationships, in fact, depends on the ratio of praise to criticism that is exchanged. The people we deal with, at work and at home, will not only flourish if we provide a good proportion of positive feedback along with occasional corrections: They are also more likely to perform well, succeed — and like us.
How to get and give critical feedback
Some people ... Continue Reading »
What if one experience could make you lose your sense of self, forget time, and feel deeply connected to everything around you?
Experts Jamie Wheal, Matthew Johnson, PhD, and James Fadiman, PhD, give us a deeper look at psychedelic medicine, exploring how substances like psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca change the way we see ourselves and the world. Used carefully, they can bring insight and unity. However, without support, they can be overwhelming and reveal just how fragile our sense of reality can be. These researchers explain the difference.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
This video 3 experts reveal how psychedelics can expand the walls of perception is featured ... Continue Reading »
There’s an old saying that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. The idea behind this sentiment is that we might disagree on the importance we assign to various aspects of a problem — whether personal, societal, or scientific — as well as on what ought to be done about that problem from an actionable standpoint. However, in order to have a meaningful conversation about ethics, policy, or our approach to solving or otherwise addressing such a problem, we all have to share the same factual reality: at least by agreeing on what the facts of the problem actually are.
Here in 2025, unfortunately, verifiable facts are often countered with untrue narratives that stem from motivated reasoning, with many groups denying factual reality in order to promote policies that are at odds with those established facts. Some even point to Einstein in defense of this approach, noting a quote that’s often attributed to him:
“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”
In the aftermath of the rise of “alternative facts,” a term popularized by American ... Continue Reading »
Defining exactly what we mean by “life” — in all its varied forms — has long been a formidable challenge. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book titled What is Life?” in 1944. More than 80 years later, despite all our progress in biological science (including the discovery of DNA’s structure), we still don’t have a solid answer.
None of the many suggested definitions has been widely accepted. It seems nearly every researcher in the field has a favorite one. The recent discovery, by Ryo Harada of Dalhousie University and colleagues, of a microorganism with a genome so small it contains, in essence, only enough genes for its own replication, just adds to the complication.
The archaea in question (Sukunaarchaeum mirabile) lives within another organism and appears to be something between a virus and a bacterium. By the traditional dictionary definition, “life” requires metabolism, growth, replication, and adaptation to the environment. Most scientists, therefore, don’t consider viruses alive because they can’t reproduce and grow by themselves and do not metabolize. Yet they possess a genetic mechanism that enables them to reproduce, with the ... Continue Reading »
I love books. If I go to the bookstore to browse, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale and can’t help but peek into any neighborhood book exchange I pass. Even the smell of old books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.
The only problem is that my book-collecting habit outpaces my ability to actually read them, leading to FOMO and the occasional pangs of guilt over the many unread volumes piling up on my shelves. Sound familiar?
However, it’s possible my guilt is entirely misplaced. According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary,” and he believes our antilibraries aren’t signs of laziness or some intellectual failing. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Umberto Eco signs a book. You can see a portion of the author’s vast antilibrary in the background.
Living with an antilibrary
Taleb laid out the concept of the antilibrary in ... Continue Reading »
By now, most of us have seen the data. One in two adults in the U.S. now reports experiencing loneliness, according to the U.S. Surgeon General (Murthy, 2023). Social isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32%, and early death by 60% — a health impact comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (Holt‑Lunstad et al., 2015). At the same time, trust in neighbors, co-workers, and institutions is at historic lows (Pew Research Center, 2022), and global workplace disengagement is costing $8.8 trillion each year (Gallup, 2023).
Workplace loneliness is also a growing issue: more than half of U.S. employees report feeling lonely at work, and lonely workers are significantly more likely to miss work, report lower performance, and consider leaving their jobs — contributing to productivity costs upwards of $154 billion annually (Cigna, 2022).
We tend to think of these as different challenges, but when we [at chamberofconnection.org] worked with researchers to understand the root causes we found there is one underlying issue — the erosion of everyday connection.
When I talk to people about the decline in ... Continue Reading »
Within practically every modern galaxy, a central supermassive black hole can be found. Our own Milky Way houses Sagittarius A*, which weighs in at just over 4 million solar masses. Although that might sound like an impressively massive black hole, it’s actually on the small side for a galaxy as massive as ours. Andromeda is only a little bit more massive than the Milky Way, but its supermassive black hole is more than 100 million solar masses. Nearby, in the Virgo Cluster, the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has an even more massive black hole: at 6.5 billion solar masses. For the most massive galaxies in the nearby Universe, supermassive black holes of ~1 billion solar masses or more are actually quite common.
But even in these giant elliptical galaxies, the most massive known supermassive black holes make up only about ~0.1% of the stellar mass (i.e., the mass that’s present in the form of stars) of the galaxies themselves. This ratio, of 1000-to-1 (for stellar mass to mass of the central black hole), is very common in the nearby Universe. ... Continue Reading »
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Think back to when you were young (or maybe you are young and currently reading way above your grade level)—what was your dream? Maybe you had a love of horses, so you envisioned that Breyer collection one day turning into a stable where you were the vet who kept them healthy. Or maybe your dad occasionally let you hold his guitar while you listened to music, and your dream became to one day play for real on a stage?
When John Amaechi was young, he wanted to become an NBA player.
“Everybody told me it was ridiculous. Everybody told me it had never been done. Everybody told me that a fat kid from Stockport who liked eating pie and reading books was hardly a candidate for the world’s best basketball league. But to me, it was compelling.”
However, the lofty aspiration of becoming a professional basketball player wasn’t enough on its own—by the age of 7, he also knew he wanted to become a psychologist. So, after competing at the highest level of basketball ... Continue Reading »
It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “How would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.
Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is.
Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward. There is a pregnant silence, and I think, ah, what should go in that silence? Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote about my recent life. After quickly flipping through a few possibilities, I settle on one and utter a few words. They work fine, but there’s not that effortless fluidity of real skill. And as a result, the conversation remains leaden — people don’t feel comfortable responding to me because I don’t sound natural. (This happens to me all the time, by the way.)
Sometimes I fare better by simply telling myself to act like a charismatic person. I know some of those, and I can slip into a passable imitation of one much more easily than I ... Continue Reading »
Membrane companies translate customer needs into clear asks for suppliers, ruthlessly re-evaluating their own center of gravity. They disintegrate processes when doing so allows them to move faster, stay closer to their customers, and free up resources for investment in the capabilities that are most differentiating for those customers. Michael Dell, of Dell Technologies, was a pioneer of this kind of virtually integrated membrane organization. In his words, membrane companies prioritize “the compression of time and distance backward into the supply chain and forward to the customer.”
Dell eliminated the traditional dealer channel by selling directly to customers, removing reseller markups, and reducing inventory costs. And rather than attempting to manufacture all their computer components in-house, Dell partnered with specialized manufacturers and focused on selecting the best available components from them. Having blurred the boundaries between suppliers, manufacturers, and end users, Dell was prescient enough to realize that technology could and should be used to achieve the same goals, further shortening the distance between company’s suppliers and their customers because less distance means more intimacy.
In the post-AI world, the entrepreneurial role ... Continue Reading »
We all love to criticize. Unfortunately, we also hate being criticized. That leads to a happiness problem in the giant, constant, panoramic review that is the experience of modern life. We post and comment on others with abandon, but feel aggrieved at the way others assess us, both online and in person. The world seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Fortunately, though, each of us can change how we give and take criticism, in ways that will make us less likely to harm others, more immune to taking offense, and better able to benefit from feedback — even when it is negative.
Just as important for getting along with others is the ability to give compliments. The quality of our relationships, in fact, depends on the ratio of praise to criticism that is exchanged. The people we deal with, at work and at home, will not only flourish if we provide a good proportion of positive feedback along with occasional corrections: They are also more likely to perform well, succeed — and like us.
How to get and give critical feedback
Some people ... 
There’s an old saying that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. The idea behind this sentiment is that we might disagree on the importance we assign to various aspects of a problem — whether personal, societal, or scientific — as well as on what ought to be done about that problem from an actionable standpoint. However, in order to have a meaningful conversation about ethics, policy, or our approach to solving or otherwise addressing such a problem, we all have to share the same factual reality: at least by agreeing on what the facts of the problem actually are.
Here in 2025, unfortunately, verifiable facts are often countered with untrue narratives that stem from motivated reasoning, with many groups denying factual reality in order to promote policies that are at odds with those established facts. Some even point to Einstein in defense of this approach, noting a quote that’s often attributed to him:
“If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.”
In the aftermath of the rise of “alternative facts,” a term popularized by American ... 
Defining exactly what we mean by “life” — in all its varied forms — has long been a formidable challenge. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book titled What is Life?” in 1944. More than 80 years later, despite all our progress in biological science (including the discovery of DNA’s structure), we still don’t have a solid answer.
None of the many suggested definitions has been widely accepted. It seems nearly every researcher in the field has a favorite one. The recent discovery, by Ryo Harada of Dalhousie University and colleagues, of a microorganism with a genome so small it contains, in essence, only enough genes for its own replication, just adds to the complication.
The archaea in question (Sukunaarchaeum mirabile) lives within another organism and appears to be something between a virus and a bacterium. By the traditional dictionary definition, “life” requires metabolism, growth, replication, and adaptation to the environment. Most scientists, therefore, don’t consider viruses alive because they can’t reproduce and grow by themselves and do not metabolize. Yet they possess a genetic mechanism that enables them to reproduce, with the ... 
I love books. If I go to the bookstore to browse, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale and can’t help but peek into any neighborhood book exchange I pass. Even the smell of old books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.
The only problem is that my book-collecting habit outpaces my ability to actually read them, leading to FOMO and the occasional pangs of guilt over the many unread volumes piling up on my shelves. Sound familiar?
However, it’s possible my guilt is entirely misplaced. According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary,” and he believes our antilibraries aren’t signs of laziness or some intellectual failing. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Umberto Eco signs a book. You can see a portion of the author’s vast antilibrary in the background.
Living with an antilibrary
Taleb laid out the concept of the antilibrary in ... 
By now, most of us have seen the data. One in two adults in the U.S. now reports experiencing loneliness, according to the U.S. Surgeon General (Murthy, 2023). Social isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32%, and early death by 60% — a health impact comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (Holt‑Lunstad et al., 2015). At the same time, trust in neighbors, co-workers, and institutions is at historic lows (Pew Research Center, 2022), and global workplace disengagement is costing $8.8 trillion each year (Gallup, 2023).
Workplace loneliness is also a growing issue: more than half of U.S. employees report feeling lonely at work, and lonely workers are significantly more likely to miss work, report lower performance, and consider leaving their jobs — contributing to productivity costs upwards of $154 billion annually (Cigna, 2022).
We tend to think of these as different challenges, but when we [at chamberofconnection.org] worked with researchers to understand the root causes we found there is one underlying issue — the erosion of everyday connection.
When I talk to people about the decline in ... 
Within practically every modern galaxy, a central supermassive black hole can be found. Our own Milky Way houses Sagittarius A*, which weighs in at just over 4 million solar masses. Although that might sound like an impressively massive black hole, it’s actually on the small side for a galaxy as massive as ours. Andromeda is only a little bit more massive than the Milky Way, but its supermassive black hole is more than 100 million solar masses. Nearby, in the Virgo Cluster, the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has an even more massive black hole: at 6.5 billion solar masses. For the most massive galaxies in the nearby Universe, supermassive black holes of ~1 billion solar masses or more are actually quite common.
But even in these giant elliptical galaxies, the most massive known supermassive black holes make up only about ~0.1% of the stellar mass (i.e., the mass that’s present in the form of stars) of the galaxies themselves. This ratio, of 1000-to-1 (for stellar mass to mass of the central black hole), is very common in the nearby Universe. ... 
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Think back to when you were young (or maybe you are young and currently reading way above your grade level)—what was your dream? Maybe you had a love of horses, so you envisioned that Breyer collection one day turning into a stable where you were the vet who kept them healthy. Or maybe your dad occasionally let you hold his guitar while you listened to music, and your dream became to one day play for real on a stage?
When John Amaechi was young, he wanted to become an NBA player.
“Everybody told me it was ridiculous. Everybody told me it had never been done. Everybody told me that a fat kid from Stockport who liked eating pie and reading books was hardly a candidate for the world’s best basketball league. But to me, it was compelling.”
However, the lofty aspiration of becoming a professional basketball player wasn’t enough on its own—by the age of 7, he also knew he wanted to become a psychologist. So, after competing at the highest level of basketball ... 
It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “How would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.
Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is.
Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward. There is a pregnant silence, and I think, ah, what should go in that silence? Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote about my recent life. After quickly flipping through a few possibilities, I settle on one and utter a few words. They work fine, but there’s not that effortless fluidity of real skill. And as a result, the conversation remains leaden — people don’t feel comfortable responding to me because I don’t sound natural. (This happens to me all the time, by the way.)
Sometimes I fare better by simply telling myself to act like a charismatic person. I know some of those, and I can slip into a passable imitation of one much more easily than I ... 
Membrane companies translate customer needs into clear asks for suppliers, ruthlessly re-evaluating their own center of gravity. They disintegrate processes when doing so allows them to move faster, stay closer to their customers, and free up resources for investment in the capabilities that are most differentiating for those customers. Michael Dell, of Dell Technologies, was a pioneer of this kind of virtually integrated membrane organization. In his words, membrane companies prioritize “the compression of time and distance backward into the supply chain and forward to the customer.”
Dell eliminated the traditional dealer channel by selling directly to customers, removing reseller markups, and reducing inventory costs. And rather than attempting to manufacture all their computer components in-house, Dell partnered with specialized manufacturers and focused on selecting the best available components from them. Having blurred the boundaries between suppliers, manufacturers, and end users, Dell was prescient enough to realize that technology could and should be used to achieve the same goals, further shortening the distance between company’s suppliers and their customers because less distance means more intimacy.
In the post-AI world, the entrepreneurial role ...