“Hello, world!” read one inconspicuous tweet posted on the Twitter account of Tom Oxley, founder and CEO of Synchron, a startup that develops brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in December 2021. The tweet wasn’t written by Oxley but one of Synchron’s patients, Philip O’Keefe. O’Keefe suffers from ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that is causing him to gradually lose control of his muscles. His BCI, implanted almost two years prior, allowed him to type out the message with his mind, partially restoring his ability to communicate and interact with the world.
hello, world! Short tweet. Monumental progress.
— Thomas Oxley (@tomoxl) December 23, 2021
When BCIs pop up in the popular media, it’s often in connection to Elon Musk’s Neuralink. But Synchron may be ahead of the game in some respects. The company was founded four years earlier than its chief competitor, in 2012, has received investments from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, and has already launched two trials – one in Australia, another in the US. The company’s key advantage over Neuralink, which took on its first human patient earlier this year, is that ... Continue Reading »
Very few of my friends understand the basic probabilities of life. They just see things in black and white, and almost always from hunches. Can you tell me why a lot of humans are so bad at probability, and why it’s important to be better?
– Pratyush, India
I used to work with someone who called me Hopscotch Jonny. Hopscotch is a popular playground game where you jump from one square to another: one leg, two legs, one leg, two legs. Hop, hop, hop. The reason I was called Hopscotch Jonny is because I spend a lot of my life occupied with fads. I live in phases. I’ll become obsessed with a topic, but five books on the subject, and then ramble on about it to anyone who will listen, boring them all. My life is consumed by a new obsession for a few months before I move on to a new thing — before I hop to the next box. My study is a jungle thanks to my pot-plant phase, my cupboard is filled with swimming artifacts from my triathlon months, ... Continue Reading »
As modern humans we experience a different world and experience than anyone who has ever come before us. This is because we’ve inverted the dynamics of how our lives unfold. We live on a planet defined by local stability, but global instability. The hunter-gatherers that came before us lived in a world that was defined by local instability, but global stability, says political scientist Dr. Brian Klaas.
As hunter-gatherers, their day-to-day lives in their local environment was unpredictable. Now we have flipped that world. We experience local stability, but global instability. We have extreme regularity in our daily lives. We can order products online and expect exactly when they’re going to arrive. We can go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and it’s going to taste roughly the same.
But our world is changing faster than it ever has before. Consequentially, when things do go wrong, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate. This is where that sort of aspect ... Continue Reading »
If you examine the Universe extremely closely, by probing the fundamental entities with it on the smallest possible scales, you’ll discover that reality is fundamentally quantum in nature. Matter itself is made up of indivisible, uncuttable quantum entities: particles like quarks, leptons, and bosons. These quanta have charges (color charge, electric charge, weak isospin and weak hypercharge, and “mass/energy” as a gravitational charge), and it’s the exchange of quanta between these charged particles (gluons, photons, W-and-Z bosons, etc.) that mediate these forces. There’s even a Higgs force as well.
However, one type of quantum that’s never been detected is the graviton: the theoretical particle that mediates the gravitational force. Even though it’s predicted to exist (and to have a spin of 2, unique among all particles) and, just like light is composed of photons, gravitational waves should be composed of gravitons, those predictions rely on an unproven assumption: that gravity is fundamentally a quantum force in nature. Is that assumption necessarily true? It isn’t in Einstein’s general relativity, and that prompted this week’s question from Eddy from Canada, who asks:
“If space-time ... Continue Reading »
A duo of economists recently surveyed where 6,141 members of the world’s global elite went to college. The results show that a select few academic institutions graduate the most powerful and influential people.
Ricardo J. Salas Diaz is a lecturer at Dartmouth and Kevin Young is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Together, they made a list of the world’s billionaires, national political leaders, directors of the 150 largest companies, heads of international organizations, and directors of major think tanks, foundations, and non-governmental organizations. They then pored through these individuals’ biographies with a simple question: Where did they receive their college educations?
Salas Diaz and Young found that the global elite tended to attend institutions within their home countries. For example, 92% of American elites went to college in the U.S., while 85% of French elites were educated in France, etc. When young elites ventured beyond their national borders, they most often pursued degrees in the United Kingdom or the United States. Most strikingly, the global elite attended a relatively small number of prestigious institutions. Nearly one in ... Continue Reading »
Coming into the holidays, I wanted to take a beat and reflect back on the last several months. So I wrote down 10 lessons I learned this year. Perhaps some of these will resonate with you, too.
The year was a big one, both personally—and professionally. We launched an ETF in June, I started my Big Think column in July, and we had our second daughter in August (yes, I’m a little tired).
One big observation as we head into 2025: we live in an age of relentless distraction. It has become far too easy to focus on the wrong things—often all at once. Guard your time. Simplify your routines. Give more than you take.
The 10 lessons begin with one idea I learned from my 3-year-old daughter: Look up at the trees more often.
Key quote: “My three-year-old daughter loves to look at trees. She’ll stop mid-walk, point to the branches swaying above, and say something like, ‘Look at the leaves dancing.’ She notices everything: the way light filters through the branches, the colors that shift with the seasons, even the patterns in ... Continue Reading »
On a frosty winter’s night more than 2,000 years ago, a young expectant mother found herself in a wooden manger as she prepared to give birth. Shortly after the delivery, three wise men from the east arrived, bearing gifts for the newborn: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. While these three treasured gifts were all valuable, only two of them are resources unique to planet Earth. The other one — gold — is found all throughout the Solar System and the Universe. For generations, we valued this element for its rarity, shine, luster, and physical and chemical properties. What we didn’t know, however, was how to create it.
As recently as five years ago, this remained the case. While there were numerous candidate processes for how gold could be created in the Universe, we had no idea which one dominated. In fact, there were no fewer than five separate candidates for how the element gold was made:
in the more massive stars that fuse hydrogen into helium
in dying stars that have reached the tail end of the red giant phase
in massive stars that undergo ... Continue Reading »
Each one of us — in a very physical and physiological way — is 13.8 billion years old. This is the age of the Universe. It took our cosmos this long to forge the elements and build up the cumulative complexity that makes us what we are. It took the Universe 13.8 billion years to create creatures capable of realizing they are the result of an agglomeration this lengthy.
This is another way of understanding one of Carl Sagan’s most famous sayings. In 1973, Sagan memorably declared we “are made of star stuff.” By this, he meant that the matter within our bodies is the byproduct of deceased stars. We, quite literally, are ancient stardust.
But people haven’t always appreciated this. Far from it. What’s more, Sagan was far from the first to claim we are forged of “star stuff.” The debate — about whether our bodies are comprised of the same ingredients as suns — has raged for centuries. This is the story of how we figured out we are descended from the chemical cauldrons that are suns, and how this ... Continue Reading »
It likely wasn’t long after the first utterances of our ancestors that misinformation was born. It may have been an honest misunderstanding. It may have been a dubious actor trying to get one up on his fellow tribe members. Whatever the case, half-truths and alternative facts are nothing new. Granted, a case can be made that social media and AI have supercharged the spread of misinformation but the age-old, and rather humbling, reason it persists is simple enough: Under the right conditions, everyone is susceptible.
One reason is “decision fatigue.” We often lack the specialized knowledge to thoroughly assess the many ideas, statements, and news stories we encounter daily. Even if we could gain that knowledge, learning takes time and we live busy lives. We can check in on what the experts say, but experts will disagree, so that route means determining whom to listen to.
So what do we do? We google our question, fact-check it against a favorite source, and move on.
But as Alex Edmans, professor of finance at the London Business School and the author of May Contain Lies, ... Continue Reading »
I use the internet a lot. I used it to research this article, to get this job, and to check my social media on company time. I use GPS to check the traffic, and I use Google to ask things I’m too old to ask: What’s the best way to cook rice? How do you paint a wall? What does this red light in my car mean?
But for all its connected convenience, the digital age still cannot solve all of my problems. It can’t tell me where I’ve left my car keys or where I saved that document I need for this form. It can’t tell me which of my friends has been lying to me or who stole a comically named street sign from a village nearby. So, what’s a problem-soaked man to do? Who can help me when even ChatGPT can’t?
Well, it’s time I dusted off my necromantic tomes and called in the undead.
Wise old demons
In medieval Europe, there were very few businesses in which the Church didn’t have a share. They brewed beer, printed books, and ran ... Continue Reading »
“Hello, world!” read one inconspicuous tweet posted on the Twitter account of Tom Oxley, founder and CEO of Synchron, a startup that develops brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in December 2021. The tweet wasn’t written by Oxley but one of Synchron’s patients, Philip O’Keefe. O’Keefe suffers from ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that is causing him to gradually lose control of his muscles. His BCI, implanted almost two years prior, allowed him to type out the message with his mind, partially restoring his ability to communicate and interact with the world.
hello, world! Short tweet. Monumental progress.
— Thomas Oxley (@tomoxl) December 23, 2021
When BCIs pop up in the popular media, it’s often in connection to Elon Musk’s Neuralink. But Synchron may be ahead of the game in some respects. The company was founded four years earlier than its chief competitor, in 2012, has received investments from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, and has already launched two trials – one in Australia, another in the US. The company’s key advantage over Neuralink, which took on its first human patient earlier this year, is that ... 
Very few of my friends understand the basic probabilities of life. They just see things in black and white, and almost always from hunches. Can you tell me why a lot of humans are so bad at probability, and why it’s important to be better?
– Pratyush, India
I used to work with someone who called me Hopscotch Jonny. Hopscotch is a popular playground game where you jump from one square to another: one leg, two legs, one leg, two legs. Hop, hop, hop. The reason I was called Hopscotch Jonny is because I spend a lot of my life occupied with fads. I live in phases. I’ll become obsessed with a topic, but five books on the subject, and then ramble on about it to anyone who will listen, boring them all. My life is consumed by a new obsession for a few months before I move on to a new thing — before I hop to the next box. My study is a jungle thanks to my pot-plant phase, my cupboard is filled with swimming artifacts from my triathlon months, ... 
If you examine the Universe extremely closely, by probing the fundamental entities with it on the smallest possible scales, you’ll discover that reality is fundamentally quantum in nature. Matter itself is made up of indivisible, uncuttable quantum entities: particles like quarks, leptons, and bosons. These quanta have charges (color charge, electric charge, weak isospin and weak hypercharge, and “mass/energy” as a gravitational charge), and it’s the exchange of quanta between these charged particles (gluons, photons, W-and-Z bosons, etc.) that mediate these forces. There’s even a Higgs force as well.
However, one type of quantum that’s never been detected is the graviton: the theoretical particle that mediates the gravitational force. Even though it’s predicted to exist (and to have a spin of 2, unique among all particles) and, just like light is composed of photons, gravitational waves should be composed of gravitons, those predictions rely on an unproven assumption: that gravity is fundamentally a quantum force in nature. Is that assumption necessarily true? It isn’t in Einstein’s general relativity, and that prompted this week’s question from Eddy from Canada, who asks:
“If space-time ... 
A duo of economists recently surveyed where 6,141 members of the world’s global elite went to college. The results show that a select few academic institutions graduate the most powerful and influential people.
Ricardo J. Salas Diaz is a lecturer at Dartmouth and Kevin Young is an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Together, they made a list of the world’s billionaires, national political leaders, directors of the 150 largest companies, heads of international organizations, and directors of major think tanks, foundations, and non-governmental organizations. They then pored through these individuals’ biographies with a simple question: Where did they receive their college educations?
Salas Diaz and Young found that the global elite tended to attend institutions within their home countries. For example, 92% of American elites went to college in the U.S., while 85% of French elites were educated in France, etc. When young elites ventured beyond their national borders, they most often pursued degrees in the United Kingdom or the United States. Most strikingly, the global elite attended a relatively small number of prestigious institutions. Nearly one in ... 
Coming into the holidays, I wanted to take a beat and reflect back on the last several months. So I wrote down 10 lessons I learned this year. Perhaps some of these will resonate with you, too.
The year was a big one, both personally—and professionally. We launched an ETF in June, I started my Big Think column in July, and we had our second daughter in August (yes, I’m a little tired).
One big observation as we head into 2025: we live in an age of relentless distraction. It has become far too easy to focus on the wrong things—often all at once. Guard your time. Simplify your routines. Give more than you take.
The 10 lessons begin with one idea I learned from my 3-year-old daughter: Look up at the trees more often.
Key quote: “My three-year-old daughter loves to look at trees. She’ll stop mid-walk, point to the branches swaying above, and say something like, ‘Look at the leaves dancing.’ She notices everything: the way light filters through the branches, the colors that shift with the seasons, even the patterns in ... 
On a frosty winter’s night more than 2,000 years ago, a young expectant mother found herself in a wooden manger as she prepared to give birth. Shortly after the delivery, three wise men from the east arrived, bearing gifts for the newborn: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. While these three treasured gifts were all valuable, only two of them are resources unique to planet Earth. The other one — gold — is found all throughout the Solar System and the Universe. For generations, we valued this element for its rarity, shine, luster, and physical and chemical properties. What we didn’t know, however, was how to create it.
As recently as five years ago, this remained the case. While there were numerous candidate processes for how gold could be created in the Universe, we had no idea which one dominated. In fact, there were no fewer than five separate candidates for how the element gold was made:
in the more massive stars that fuse hydrogen into helium
in dying stars that have reached the tail end of the red giant phase
in massive stars that undergo ... 
Each one of us — in a very physical and physiological way — is 13.8 billion years old. This is the age of the Universe. It took our cosmos this long to forge the elements and build up the cumulative complexity that makes us what we are. It took the Universe 13.8 billion years to create creatures capable of realizing they are the result of an agglomeration this lengthy.
This is another way of understanding one of Carl Sagan’s most famous sayings. In 1973, Sagan memorably declared we “are made of star stuff.” By this, he meant that the matter within our bodies is the byproduct of deceased stars. We, quite literally, are ancient stardust.
But people haven’t always appreciated this. Far from it. What’s more, Sagan was far from the first to claim we are forged of “star stuff.” The debate — about whether our bodies are comprised of the same ingredients as suns — has raged for centuries. This is the story of how we figured out we are descended from the chemical cauldrons that are suns, and how this ... 
It likely wasn’t long after the first utterances of our ancestors that misinformation was born. It may have been an honest misunderstanding. It may have been a dubious actor trying to get one up on his fellow tribe members. Whatever the case, half-truths and alternative facts are nothing new. Granted, a case can be made that social media and AI have supercharged the spread of misinformation but the age-old, and rather humbling, reason it persists is simple enough: Under the right conditions, everyone is susceptible.
One reason is “decision fatigue.” We often lack the specialized knowledge to thoroughly assess the many ideas, statements, and news stories we encounter daily. Even if we could gain that knowledge, learning takes time and we live busy lives. We can check in on what the experts say, but experts will disagree, so that route means determining whom to listen to.
So what do we do? We google our question, fact-check it against a favorite source, and move on.
But as Alex Edmans, professor of finance at the London Business School and the author of May Contain Lies, ... 
I use the internet a lot. I used it to research this article, to get this job, and to check my social media on company time. I use GPS to check the traffic, and I use Google to ask things I’m too old to ask: What’s the best way to cook rice? How do you paint a wall? What does this red light in my car mean?
But for all its connected convenience, the digital age still cannot solve all of my problems. It can’t tell me where I’ve left my car keys or where I saved that document I need for this form. It can’t tell me which of my friends has been lying to me or who stole a comically named street sign from a village nearby. So, what’s a problem-soaked man to do? Who can help me when even ChatGPT can’t?
Well, it’s time I dusted off my necromantic tomes and called in the undead.
Wise old demons
In medieval Europe, there were very few businesses in which the Church didn’t have a share. They brewed beer, printed books, and ran ...