Big 21st-Century Ideas the World is Counting on You to Know (Share More in the Comments!)
In a lecture I attended last year my professor prefaced a discussion of game theory with "and the concept of a prisoner's dilemma is one of those things I am confident saying you are not an educated person in any meaningful sense if you have never taken the trouble to understand or learn it. The idea that we can map out the conditions under which cooperators will defect given individual incentives, even despite the fact that the collective incentive can be to cooperate for a higher payoff, is so fundamental to understanding the problems of the 21st century (like Climate Change) that I think it's only fair that we set our bar/expectations for the educated person high enough that they would know this enough to be able to act on it." This got me thinking: what else would a list of things every 21st Century person should know include? Pick any discipline you want, but try to meet my criteria. Here's mine! (A list like this is bound to sound opinionated and self-co...