Search
Critical Thinking
Throughout history, the ability to tell increasingly believable stories has become available to more people. Kevin Ashton says that’s a blessing and a curse.
"Broadly speaking, it's at least plausible, this might be right."
How many stupid acts does it take to make a person stupid?
Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit taught us how to separate good science from the work of charlatans. In 2026, that matters more than ever.
I'm definitely a Kitsune, but would a Kitsune actually say that?
Many top performers start behind — and overtake the early leaders later.
Not all knowledge carries over.
Reading isn’t just writing prep; together, reading and writing help writers think and generate original ideas through extended cognition.
A tour of the literary cover-ups, extraterrestrials, and cryptids lurking in the bookish backwoods.
As technology advances, more opportunities for cheating arise. Large language models aren't posing a new problem; they're how students cheat themselves.
What a 1950s experiment reveals about conformity in the age of the internet.
When a word comes to mean everything, it means nothing.
Metacognition — the ability to think about your thinking — can help you learn faster and make better decisions.
Philosophers rarely change their minds. These thinkers did — often at social and professional cost.
A childhood spent under the spell of sleight-of-hand taught me skepticism, curiosity, and the habit of looking beneath appearances.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Real understanding, argues Jeff DeGraff, doesn’t come from outputs — it comes from practice.
“Who ya gonna believe: me or your own eyes?” Until you can assess your perception, the answer should be neither.
"We are racing towards a new era in which we outsource cognitive abilities that are central to our identity as thinking beings," writes computer scientist Louis Rosenberg.
“It is natural to want to avoid failure. But when we avoid failure, we also avoid discovery and accomplishment."
"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD."
Arendt thought 20th-century philosophy had become too passive and abstract. She called for "active thinking" that prepares us to live in the real world.
Grandmasters and drug dealers have one thing in common: They are many steps ahead of their rivals.
A brief guide to habits that separate deep understanding from superficial knowledge — and how to cultivate them.
Timothy Caulfield, a leading science communicator, discusses the challenges of combatting misinformation in an age of information overload.
"Ultimately, the choice rests with each individual: whether to take the convenient route of allowing AI to handle our critical thinking, or to preserve this essential cognitive process for ourselves."
Yondr CEO Graham Dugoni unpacks the technological zeitgeist in this exclusive Big Think interview covering media ecology, leadership, AI, human connection, and much more.
Astronomer Adam Frank reflects on some responses to his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast.
Participants’ brains revealed they were doing a kind of “neural replay” of the game they had been manipulated to win.