Post Big Ideas World

The NYTimes has an interesting article up about the difference between information, knowledge, and ideas. Some favorite passages:

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief...

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions...

The implications of a society that no longer thinks big are enormous. Ideas aren’t just intellectual playthings. They have practical effects....

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

Think about that.

Read the whole thing it is definitely worth it, and food for thought on the first day of school.

Image Credit: Rene' West, Line drawing of The Thinker