Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, wildfires, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression — we feel pity for those pointlessly suffering and a desire, even an obligation, to help. So we donate to disaster relief; we organize a collection for food, water, or first aid; possibly we volunteer. Almost never do we know the people in need: they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, people we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did. Yet we — at least most of us — want to help.
This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is not written into the human DNA. Nor was it found in the ancient roots of our cultural heritage in the West. Philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds enthusiastically agreed that helping others was appropriate and often obligatory, but altruistic acts were focused almost exclusively on close genetic and social relations — family, friends, and, less frequently, others “like us” in the same community. The sense that anyone ... Continue Reading »
Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced collapsed within a single generation.
Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a single catastrophic event.
This video The real lesson from the first time globalization died is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you can often find on the internet, there’s a hole in the Universe. There’s a region of space so large and so empty, a region that spans more than a billion light-years across, where there’s nothing located within it at all. There’s no matter of any type:
no normal matter,
no dark matter,
no stars,
no galaxies,
no plasma,
no gas,
no dust,
no black holes,
and no anything else.
There’s also no radiation emerging from it at all, either. It’s an example of truly empty space, and its existence has been visually captured by our greatest telescopes.
At least, that’s what some people are saying, in a photographic meme that’s been spreading around the internet for years and refuses to die. Scientifically, though, there’s nothing true about these assertions at all. There is no hole in the Universe; the closest we have are the underdense regions known as cosmic voids, which still contain matter. Moreover, this image isn’t a void or hole at all, but a cloud of light-blocking neutral gas, made simply of plain old collections of atoms. Let’s do the ... Continue Reading »
When I started at Tesla, I assumed that Elon and I looked at work processes from much the same perspective. This was true, but only to a degree. The company had gone from a start-up to a large manufacturer without really defining how to solve problems and scale. Instead, incredible talent and creativity in the moment drove many breakthroughs. But as Tesla grew, the whole team began to define an entire operating system that emphasized speed and simplicity. The objective: exponential growth. Elon called this formula “the Algorithm.”
To survive in the twenty-first century, older companies need growth and efficiency just as much as anyone. The steps of the Algorithm can lead to dramatic improvement in speed and quality, even in the most venerable enterprises.
Consider General Motors. The century-old behemoth has a reputation, gained over the decades, for running a rigid hierarchy and resisting change. In the 1980s the entrepreneur Ross Perot bought a piece of the company, joined the board, and vowed to modernize it. He later lamented that modernizing GM was “like teaching an elephant to tap dance.”
In 2022 ... Continue Reading »
Within the span of a single generation, nearly every major civilization in the Mediterranean world collapsed simultaneously: the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the great palace cities of Cyprus and the Levant.
What is even more consequential than the age that preceeded it is what came next: a 400-year period that shaped the world as we know it today.
This video The collapse that accidentally built the modern world is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
For as long as people have been putting effort into anything, there’s been a push to get the most “bang” for your “buck.” More simply, it’s to get the greatest amount out by putting the least amount in. And if that’s what you’re after — that type of optimization — you might have heard of the term BrainMaxxing: the evolution of the mental part of what was once called lifehacking. Unfortunately for those of you who are truly seeing to grow your minds, that arena is full of what can only be rightfully called grift:
detoxing your body from activities that give you the “hit” of a mental reward,
giving your brain a regular schedule of structured activities that stimulate your cognitive efforts,
supplements to “wake your brain up” optimally and “give your brain rest” at the appropriate time,
and using digital tools to, as one dedicated website calls it, maximize your brain potential.
While the BrainMaxxing movement does have a large amount of extraneous, profiteering aspects surrounding it, the idea at the core of it is sound: you can, in fact, through sustained hard ... Continue Reading »
A man awakes in some kind of lab, his body riddled with tubes and wires. Nearby, a robot asks him what two plus two is. He can’t remember his name, where he is, or how he got here. At least he knows two plus two is four.
Actually, he knows a lot more than that. Walking around the lab, he finds a test tube and a stopwatch. Using the stopwatch to time how long it takes for the test tube to fall to the floor, he calculates that the gravity is stronger than on Earth. He reasons he must be in outer space. Some more tests reveal he’s not just in space but another solar system — one several light-years away from Earth, further than any human or space probe has ever ventured.
Gradually, his returning memories fill in the gaps. He is Ryland Grace. He’s an expert on speculative astrobiology, turned junior high school science teacher. He’s on a spaceship headed for the star Tau Ceti, and he’s part of a last-ditch, one-chance mission to save humanity from an extinction event.
This ... Continue Reading »
Damage isn’t always the cause of pain, and it’s never the only culprit. Pain, it turns out, is much more interesting than that.
Here’s what we do know: Science reveals that pain is biopsychosocial, produced by a combination of biological, psychological (emotional, cognitive, behavioral), and sociological (social, environmental, contextual) factors that work together to create the pain we feel. Pain lives in the glorious, messy middle of all the things that make you, you.
While holistic healthcare and mind-body medicine have tried to change the narrative for decades, even they miss the big picture when it comes to pain. Because understanding pain isn’t just about connecting mind and body. The things going on around us — not just inside of us — change pain, too.
In order to treat pain, therefore, we can’t just fixate on the part that hurts; we must instead treat all of you.
Pain is biological
The first pillar, the biological domain of pain, includes the ingredients we’ve heard the most about: genetics, tissue damage, system dysfunction, inflammation, the wear and tear of an aging body, neurotransmitters, hormones, diet, sleep, exercise. ... Continue Reading »
No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s general relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory.
If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, general relativity has yet to let us down. From tabletop experiments to atomic clocks to celestial mechanics to gravitational lensing to the formation of the great cosmic web, its success rate is 100%. Similarly, for any particle physics experiment or interaction conceivable, whether mediated via the strong, weak, or ... Continue Reading »
Self-help tells us that we can fix anything with the right mindset, the right habits, the right 5-step plan. But what if that belief is doing more harm than good?
Historian Kate Bowler traces the deep roots of America’s obsession with self-making — from prosperity gospel theology to the endless productivity hacks of optimization culture. She explains how self-help promises control over things that are fundamentally fragile: our health, our time, our relationships, our lives.
The trouble is, we’re not machines to be upgraded. We’re human: breakable, dependent, and mortal. And any belief system that denies that will ultimately fail us.
This video The case against self-help is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, wildfires, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression — we feel pity for those pointlessly suffering and a desire, even an obligation, to help. So we donate to disaster relief; we organize a collection for food, water, or first aid; possibly we volunteer. Almost never do we know the people in need: they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, people we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did. Yet we — at least most of us — want to help.
This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is not written into the human DNA. Nor was it found in the ancient roots of our cultural heritage in the West. Philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds enthusiastically agreed that helping others was appropriate and often obligatory, but altruistic acts were focused almost exclusively on close genetic and social relations — family, friends, and, less frequently, others “like us” in the same community. The sense that anyone ... 
Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you can often find on the internet, there’s a hole in the Universe. There’s a region of space so large and so empty, a region that spans more than a billion light-years across, where there’s nothing located within it at all. There’s no matter of any type:
no normal matter,
no dark matter,
no stars,
no galaxies,
no plasma,
no gas,
no dust,
no black holes,
and no anything else.
There’s also no radiation emerging from it at all, either. It’s an example of truly empty space, and its existence has been visually captured by our greatest telescopes.
At least, that’s what some people are saying, in a photographic meme that’s been spreading around the internet for years and refuses to die. Scientifically, though, there’s nothing true about these assertions at all. There is no hole in the Universe; the closest we have are the underdense regions known as cosmic voids, which still contain matter. Moreover, this image isn’t a void or hole at all, but a cloud of light-blocking neutral gas, made simply of plain old collections of atoms. Let’s do the ... 
When I started at Tesla, I assumed that Elon and I looked at work processes from much the same perspective. This was true, but only to a degree. The company had gone from a start-up to a large manufacturer without really defining how to solve problems and scale. Instead, incredible talent and creativity in the moment drove many breakthroughs. But as Tesla grew, the whole team began to define an entire operating system that emphasized speed and simplicity. The objective: exponential growth. Elon called this formula “the Algorithm.”
To survive in the twenty-first century, older companies need growth and efficiency just as much as anyone. The steps of the Algorithm can lead to dramatic improvement in speed and quality, even in the most venerable enterprises.
Consider General Motors. The century-old behemoth has a reputation, gained over the decades, for running a rigid hierarchy and resisting change. In the 1980s the entrepreneur Ross Perot bought a piece of the company, joined the board, and vowed to modernize it. He later lamented that modernizing GM was “like teaching an elephant to tap dance.”
In 2022 ... 
For as long as people have been putting effort into anything, there’s been a push to get the most “bang” for your “buck.” More simply, it’s to get the greatest amount out by putting the least amount in. And if that’s what you’re after — that type of optimization — you might have heard of the term BrainMaxxing: the evolution of the mental part of what was once called lifehacking. Unfortunately for those of you who are truly seeing to grow your minds, that arena is full of what can only be rightfully called grift:
detoxing your body from activities that give you the “hit” of a mental reward,
giving your brain a regular schedule of structured activities that stimulate your cognitive efforts,
supplements to “wake your brain up” optimally and “give your brain rest” at the appropriate time,
and using digital tools to, as one dedicated website calls it, maximize your brain potential.
While the BrainMaxxing movement does have a large amount of extraneous, profiteering aspects surrounding it, the idea at the core of it is sound: you can, in fact, through sustained hard ... 
A man awakes in some kind of lab, his body riddled with tubes and wires. Nearby, a robot asks him what two plus two is. He can’t remember his name, where he is, or how he got here. At least he knows two plus two is four.
Actually, he knows a lot more than that. Walking around the lab, he finds a test tube and a stopwatch. Using the stopwatch to time how long it takes for the test tube to fall to the floor, he calculates that the gravity is stronger than on Earth. He reasons he must be in outer space. Some more tests reveal he’s not just in space but another solar system — one several light-years away from Earth, further than any human or space probe has ever ventured.
Gradually, his returning memories fill in the gaps. He is Ryland Grace. He’s an expert on speculative astrobiology, turned junior high school science teacher. He’s on a spaceship headed for the star Tau Ceti, and he’s part of a last-ditch, one-chance mission to save humanity from an extinction event.
This ... 
Damage isn’t always the cause of pain, and it’s never the only culprit. Pain, it turns out, is much more interesting than that.
Here’s what we do know: Science reveals that pain is biopsychosocial, produced by a combination of biological, psychological (emotional, cognitive, behavioral), and sociological (social, environmental, contextual) factors that work together to create the pain we feel. Pain lives in the glorious, messy middle of all the things that make you, you.
While holistic healthcare and mind-body medicine have tried to change the narrative for decades, even they miss the big picture when it comes to pain. Because understanding pain isn’t just about connecting mind and body. The things going on around us — not just inside of us — change pain, too.
In order to treat pain, therefore, we can’t just fixate on the part that hurts; we must instead treat all of you.
Pain is biological
The first pillar, the biological domain of pain, includes the ingredients we’ve heard the most about: genetics, tissue damage, system dysfunction, inflammation, the wear and tear of an aging body, neurotransmitters, hormones, diet, sleep, exercise. ... 
No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solved and understood the natural world around us in any sort of satisfactory sense. We have two theories that work incredibly well: in all the years we’ve been testing them, we’ve never found a single observation or made a single experimental measurement that’s conflicted with either Einstein’s general relativity or with the Standard Model’s predictions from quantum field theory.
If you want to know how gravitation works or what its effects on any object in the Universe will be, general relativity has yet to let us down. From tabletop experiments to atomic clocks to celestial mechanics to gravitational lensing to the formation of the great cosmic web, its success rate is 100%. Similarly, for any particle physics experiment or interaction conceivable, whether mediated via the strong, weak, or ...