big think

A two-minute Big Think clip of Slavoj Zizek arguing that happiness is a conformist, even unethical goal. He asks why one would want to be happy when one could be interesting.

A Big Think talk in which hedge-fund manager William Ackman goes through the basics of finance and investing in under an hour. It is pitched as a crash course on the most important concepts.

Database pioneer Michael Stonebraker argues that 'big data' is really at least four different problems: big volumes with small analytics, big analytics, velocity, and variety. He comments on where each market is heading.

Bret Victor's 2013 MIT Media Lab talk argues that the media we think with determine which thoughts are possible. He demos new representations for scientific papers, circuits, filters and signal processing.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.

Tony Seba of RethinkX presents the case that solar, wind and batteries are on a cost-decline path that makes a fully renewable grid achievable. It was made for the Global 100% RE Strategy Group's joint declaration.

Numberphile's James Grime explains Cantor's result that some infinities are bigger than others, including why the reals outnumber the integers. It is a short, accessible introduction to countable and uncountable infinity.

Alan Kay argues for rethinking how computer science is taught in schools, drawing on his work on object-oriented programming and GUIs. He discusses how poorly people understand complex systems and what education could do about it.

A Veritasium explainer on how the brain works and how we learn. It is inspired by Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and covers System 1 and System 2 thinking and why harder learning builds skill.

A short George Carlin routine in which he says the owners of the country run a big club and ordinary people are not in it.

Louis Rossmann reviews the Lenovo ThinkPad P50, covering build, thermals and throttling, then spills liquid on it to test the keyboard drainage and spill protection.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

Apple's classic 'Think Different' commercial, a one-minute spot celebrating creative misfits and innovators. This upload is from 2006.

Julia Galef uses pictures to explain Bayes' rule, then tells three personal stories showing how she applies it to improve her thinking.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.

Boston Dynamics' March 2008 video of BigDog, a four-legged robot, walking on ice and snow, climbing rubble and recovering from slips and kicks.

Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica presents at the 2016 Concordia Summit on using big data, psychographic profiling and behavioral microtargeting in elections.

Bryan Cantrill presents Manta, an object store with in-situ compute that lets tools like grep, awk, and sed run map-reduce style over huge data. He frames it as bringing the Unix philosophy to big data.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether time began at the Big Bang. It explains that the Big Bang is not what most people were taught and what 'start' of the universe really means.

A clip from the 2015 film The Big Short in which FrontPoint Partners investigate mortgage lending in Florida and place their first trade. It shows brokers and a stripper-adjacent loan scene illustrating subprime lending to unverified borrowers.

Boston Dynamics' 2010 demo of BigDog, a quadruped robot that climbs through woods, recovers from kicks, slips on ice and jogs at 5 mph. It was an early showcase of dynamic legged locomotion.

Adam Grant's TED talk on the habits of original thinkers, including procrastination and embracing failure. He argues the greatest originals fail the most because they try the most.

A clip from the 1998 film The Big Hit featuring the 'trace buster buster buster' scene, where characters try to defeat a phone trace.

A short demo of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon's adaptive keyboard row, which changes its keys based on the user's activity.

A short Simpsons clip of Helen Lovejoy shrieking 'Think of the children!', the show's parody of moral panic.

A video essay from Pop Culture Detective arguing that The Big Bang Theory normalizes sexism and toxic masculinity through its portrayal of nerd men. It analyzes recurring tropes in how the male leads treat women.

The 4K, 60fps version of Big Buck Bunny, the Creative Commons-licensed animated short film from the Blender Foundation.

A short parody that removes the laugh track from The Big Bang Theory to show how unfunny the scenes are without it.

A five-minute clip from The Big Short (2015) in which FrontPoint Partners confront Morgan Stanley risk assessors and an S&P ratings representative about inflated mortgage bond ratings.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

A Technology Connections video essay arguing that algorithmic feeds make people passive about finding content, leading to complacency in how they seek information. It urges people to actively choose what they consume.

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel about technological stagnation, AI, longevity, space travel and politics. Thiel also lays out his framing of the Antichrist as a risk of civilizational stagnation.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

A VPRO documentary in which Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff explains her book on surveillance capitalism. It covers how Google and Facebook turn personal data into raw material for prediction and behavioral influence.

BigClive tears down and tests a germicidal UVC lamp from eBay that floods a room with narrow-band ultraviolet and ozone. He warns of the eye and skin hazards.

Leslie Lamport argues that programmers, like architects, should write rigorous specifications before coding, especially for concurrent and distributed systems. The talk introduces the case for writing specs (the TLA+ mindset) as a way of thinking above the code.

An RSA Animate drawing of Barbara Ehrenreich's talk on the darker side of positive thinking. It argues that forced positivity in culture, work and policy can be harmful and played a part in the financial crisis.

David Kriesel's FrOSCon talk on how Xerox scancopiers, due to JBIG2 compression, silently replaced digits in scanned documents. He walks through how he discovered the bug and why it is so dangerous.