In any given week, you will probably talk to dozens or hundreds of people. Most of these conversations will probably be about perfunctory, practical matters: “Two tickets, please,” “No, after you,” or “Darling, do you know where Liam’s swimming trunks are?” At other times, these conversations swish gently, as with two friends chatting over coffee, or they might ramble in a debate about who’s better: the Reds or the Blues. But according to Oprah Winfrey, everyone in every conversation mostly wants the same thing.
Winfrey has interviewed tens of thousands of people over her incredible 30-year career. She’s interviewed Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and Meghan Markle, as well as a group of neo-Nazis and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (two groups who may or may not overlap). Winfrey recalls that the moment the camera stops running, and the production crew whisks off the mics, guests will invariably ask the same thing: “How did I do?”
The need for validation
Of course, you are not the president of the United States. You are not a prince across the water. You are not a ... Continue Reading »
One of the most amazing properties of gravity in the context of Einstein’s general relativity is that mass, wherever it’s concentrated, is capable of curving the very fabric of space. This leads to a number of vital effects:
other nearby objects, from gas to galaxies, get attracted to and drawn into those massive clumps,
all particles in motion, including massless particles, get gravitationally attracted to that region when they pass by it,
and the light from background objects gets deflected, bent, magnified, and distorted by that curved space as it passes through it.
That last effect is known as gravitational lensing, and it plays many important roles on cosmological scales.
You might think, then, that a large, massive clump of matter — one that behaves as a gravitational lens — would commonly bend the light from background objects into a geometrically perfect shape: a ring. In fact, that very shape was theorized by Einstein himself, and is known as an Einstein ring. But Einstein rings are exceedingly rare and are usually imperfect when they appear, instead a four-image configuration known as an Einstein cross is ... Continue Reading »
Most of us measure age by birthdays, but what if the number on your ID tells only half the story?
Dr. Morgan Levine explores the hidden clock inside our cells, unraveling how the biological age that reveals how fast our bodies are really aging is calculated.
This video The biggest myth about aging, according to science is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Consciousness feels like the most familiar thing in the world, and yet science still can’t say what it is, where it begins, or why it exists at all.
Annaka Harris examines the assumptions shaping consciousness research, from the belief that awareness requires complex brains to the intuition that thought drives behavior.
This video The hard problem of consciousness, in 53 minutes is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
The literary world is no safe haven from wild conspiracy theories. It has its own supposed cover-ups, extraterrestrials, and cryptids lurking in the bookish backwoods. These conspiracy theories aren’t typically harmful and can even offer some fun lore to draw you into the reading. Like all conspiracy theories, though, they distort our understanding of reality and history, and they can sometimes extend beyond the page to have far-reaching consequences.
A rose by any other name
Perhaps the most common literary conspiracies involve questions of authorship: the belief that a writer didn’t actually create the works credited to them. And it’s understandable why readers sometimes doubt the authenticity of the name on the cover.
For one, many authors use pseudonyms. Mary Ann Evans adopted the pen name “George Eliot” because she believed male novelists were taken more seriously; Stephen King became “Richard Bachman” because he was too prolific for the standard publishing cycle; and Benjamin Franklin pretended to be the dowager “Silence Dogood” to prank his brother James.
For another, some attributions are more a matter of convention than provable reality. Scholars can’t say with ... Continue Reading »
One of my growing concerns about artificial intelligence is that it increasingly abstracts away the need for mentorship inside organizations. When young people get hired today, it’s becoming easier for managers to spend less time teaching and more time just handing over tools. In the short run, that can look like efficiency. But I do worry about what gets lost over the long run — especially for people just starting their careers.
That’s part of what made this wide-ranging conversation between author and interviewer William Green and Nima Shayegh so enjoyable. I was especially struck by Nima’s reflections on his years of training under Lou Simpson — one of the most respected long-term investors of the past half-century. Like all great mentors, Simpson taught through osmosis: long conversations, careful questions, shared reading, and repetition over many years.
Listening to Nima — now running his own investment firm — talk about that experience was a good reminder that mastery is rarely a solo act. Even with better tools, it still comes from having someone walk alongside you, over time.
Key quote: “There were no ... Continue Reading »
For many good reasons, black holes are among the most studied objects in the entire Universe. Initially predicted back in the late 18th century in the context of Newtonian gravity, black holes were shown to arise in the context of general relativity as early as 1916. Astrophysically, they can be formed when gas clouds collapse, when the cores of stars implode, or when two neutron stars collide, among other mechanisms. They have been observed via numerous methods: from electromagnetic emissions that arise from matter around them, from the motion of stars or binary companions around them, and from the gravitational waves they emit when two of them merge together.
But perhaps, most remarkably of all, it was shown in the early 1970s that black holes cannot endure forever, but will eventually evaporate due to the continuous spontaneous emission of radiation that emerges from them: Hawking radiation. But how does Hawking radiation truly work? The most common misconception was put forth by Hawking himself: that it’s particle-antiparticle pairs, popping in-and-out of existence, near the event horizon. One member of the pair falls ... Continue Reading »
Last month, I wrote a piece here in Big Think suggesting that the public is in denial over the emerging power and associated risks of AI. Many people reacted defensively, insisting that today’s AI systems are nothing more than “stochastic parrots” that regurgitate memorized information and are structurally incapable of emergent reasoning. I appreciate that many people want this to be true, but it is an outdated narrative based on a 2021 paper that was widely misinterpreted. I want to clear up this misconception because I worry it is giving the public a false sense of security that superintelligence is not an urgent risk to society.
To address this, let me update our collective mental model: Like it or not, there is increasing evidence that frontier AI systems do not just store text patterns as statistical correlations, but also build structured internal representations (i.e., “world models”) that abstract the concepts described in the ingested content. This is not surprising since human brains do the same thing — we consume information as language but store it as abstract conceptual models. Our brains are ... Continue Reading »
In 1964, spirited debates erupted at a conference in Cardiff, Wales. The source of the consternation was extreme production delays that stemmed from malfunctioning equipment at iron and steel plants across the United Kingdom. Beginning in the twentieth century, the automation of heavy machinery enabled plants to operate continuously, increasing productivity and revenue. The downside was that any small hiccup was acutely felt, cascading through the production line. At first, it was assumed that inadequate lubrication of factory equipment was causing parts to seize up or break apart. And so, the Lubrication and Wear Group of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, along with the Iron and Steel Institute, called on engineers and representatives from industry to convene and get to the bottom of the problem. But as participants examined photos of equipment failures at plants across the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany, they realized that the problem was not in the lubrication but in the design of the equipment itself. The old designs weren’t equipped to handle the wear and tear of continuous operation, no matter how much lubrication ... Continue Reading »
One of the most difficult things about being inside our own Universe is that we only get one perspective, from our location here on Earth, to measure it from. We are stuck within our Solar System — as are all of our measuring tools and instruments — which in turn is stuck within the Milky Way, the Local Group, and our corner of the local Universe. We are stuck living in the now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang has occurred. If we want to understand what this Universe is, including what it’s made of, where it came from, and how it came to be the way it is today, this is the only perspective, location, and time at which we’re capable of making observations from. Despite how powerful it is, it’s also extraordinarily limiting.
That’s why, from a scientific point-of-view, we’re always attempting to use every trick we have:
every measurement technique,
every set of independent observations,
every theoretical tool in our arsenal,
and every piece of high-quality, relevant data that we can collect,
to try to puzzle it all out. In the quest ... Continue Reading »
In any given week, you will probably talk to dozens or hundreds of people. Most of these conversations will probably be about perfunctory, practical matters: “Two tickets, please,” “No, after you,” or “Darling, do you know where Liam’s swimming trunks are?” At other times, these conversations swish gently, as with two friends chatting over coffee, or they might ramble in a debate about who’s better: the Reds or the Blues. But according to Oprah Winfrey, everyone in every conversation mostly wants the same thing.
Winfrey has interviewed tens of thousands of people over her incredible 30-year career. She’s interviewed Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and Meghan Markle, as well as a group of neo-Nazis and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (two groups who may or may not overlap). Winfrey recalls that the moment the camera stops running, and the production crew whisks off the mics, guests will invariably ask the same thing: “How did I do?”
The need for validation
Of course, you are not the president of the United States. You are not a prince across the water. You are not a ... 
One of the most amazing properties of gravity in the context of Einstein’s general relativity is that mass, wherever it’s concentrated, is capable of curving the very fabric of space. This leads to a number of vital effects:
other nearby objects, from gas to galaxies, get attracted to and drawn into those massive clumps,
all particles in motion, including massless particles, get gravitationally attracted to that region when they pass by it,
and the light from background objects gets deflected, bent, magnified, and distorted by that curved space as it passes through it.
That last effect is known as gravitational lensing, and it plays many important roles on cosmological scales.
You might think, then, that a large, massive clump of matter — one that behaves as a gravitational lens — would commonly bend the light from background objects into a geometrically perfect shape: a ring. In fact, that very shape was theorized by Einstein himself, and is known as an Einstein ring. But Einstein rings are exceedingly rare and are usually imperfect when they appear, instead a four-image configuration known as an Einstein cross is ... 
The literary world is no safe haven from wild conspiracy theories. It has its own supposed cover-ups, extraterrestrials, and cryptids lurking in the bookish backwoods. These conspiracy theories aren’t typically harmful and can even offer some fun lore to draw you into the reading. Like all conspiracy theories, though, they distort our understanding of reality and history, and they can sometimes extend beyond the page to have far-reaching consequences.
A rose by any other name
Perhaps the most common literary conspiracies involve questions of authorship: the belief that a writer didn’t actually create the works credited to them. And it’s understandable why readers sometimes doubt the authenticity of the name on the cover.
For one, many authors use pseudonyms. Mary Ann Evans adopted the pen name “George Eliot” because she believed male novelists were taken more seriously; Stephen King became “Richard Bachman” because he was too prolific for the standard publishing cycle; and Benjamin Franklin pretended to be the dowager “Silence Dogood” to prank his brother James.
For another, some attributions are more a matter of convention than provable reality. Scholars can’t say with ... 
One of my growing concerns about artificial intelligence is that it increasingly abstracts away the need for mentorship inside organizations. When young people get hired today, it’s becoming easier for managers to spend less time teaching and more time just handing over tools. In the short run, that can look like efficiency. But I do worry about what gets lost over the long run — especially for people just starting their careers.
That’s part of what made this wide-ranging conversation between author and interviewer William Green and Nima Shayegh so enjoyable. I was especially struck by Nima’s reflections on his years of training under Lou Simpson — one of the most respected long-term investors of the past half-century. Like all great mentors, Simpson taught through osmosis: long conversations, careful questions, shared reading, and repetition over many years.
Listening to Nima — now running his own investment firm — talk about that experience was a good reminder that mastery is rarely a solo act. Even with better tools, it still comes from having someone walk alongside you, over time.
Key quote: “There were no ... 
For many good reasons, black holes are among the most studied objects in the entire Universe. Initially predicted back in the late 18th century in the context of Newtonian gravity, black holes were shown to arise in the context of general relativity as early as 1916. Astrophysically, they can be formed when gas clouds collapse, when the cores of stars implode, or when two neutron stars collide, among other mechanisms. They have been observed via numerous methods: from electromagnetic emissions that arise from matter around them, from the motion of stars or binary companions around them, and from the gravitational waves they emit when two of them merge together.
But perhaps, most remarkably of all, it was shown in the early 1970s that black holes cannot endure forever, but will eventually evaporate due to the continuous spontaneous emission of radiation that emerges from them: Hawking radiation. But how does Hawking radiation truly work? The most common misconception was put forth by Hawking himself: that it’s particle-antiparticle pairs, popping in-and-out of existence, near the event horizon. One member of the pair falls ... 
Last month, I wrote a piece here in Big Think suggesting that the public is in denial over the emerging power and associated risks of AI. Many people reacted defensively, insisting that today’s AI systems are nothing more than “stochastic parrots” that regurgitate memorized information and are structurally incapable of emergent reasoning. I appreciate that many people want this to be true, but it is an outdated narrative based on a 2021 paper that was widely misinterpreted. I want to clear up this misconception because I worry it is giving the public a false sense of security that superintelligence is not an urgent risk to society.
To address this, let me update our collective mental model: Like it or not, there is increasing evidence that frontier AI systems do not just store text patterns as statistical correlations, but also build structured internal representations (i.e., “world models”) that abstract the concepts described in the ingested content. This is not surprising since human brains do the same thing — we consume information as language but store it as abstract conceptual models. Our brains are ... 
In 1964, spirited debates erupted at a conference in Cardiff, Wales. The source of the consternation was extreme production delays that stemmed from malfunctioning equipment at iron and steel plants across the United Kingdom. Beginning in the twentieth century, the automation of heavy machinery enabled plants to operate continuously, increasing productivity and revenue. The downside was that any small hiccup was acutely felt, cascading through the production line. At first, it was assumed that inadequate lubrication of factory equipment was causing parts to seize up or break apart. And so, the Lubrication and Wear Group of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, along with the Iron and Steel Institute, called on engineers and representatives from industry to convene and get to the bottom of the problem. But as participants examined photos of equipment failures at plants across the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany, they realized that the problem was not in the lubrication but in the design of the equipment itself. The old designs weren’t equipped to handle the wear and tear of continuous operation, no matter how much lubrication ... 
One of the most difficult things about being inside our own Universe is that we only get one perspective, from our location here on Earth, to measure it from. We are stuck within our Solar System — as are all of our measuring tools and instruments — which in turn is stuck within the Milky Way, the Local Group, and our corner of the local Universe. We are stuck living in the now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang has occurred. If we want to understand what this Universe is, including what it’s made of, where it came from, and how it came to be the way it is today, this is the only perspective, location, and time at which we’re capable of making observations from. Despite how powerful it is, it’s also extraordinarily limiting.
That’s why, from a scientific point-of-view, we’re always attempting to use every trick we have:
every measurement technique,
every set of independent observations,
every theoretical tool in our arsenal,
and every piece of high-quality, relevant data that we can collect,
to try to puzzle it all out. In the quest ...