What is your worst intellectual habit?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox's fixed 9 Questions format asks this verbatim across respondents.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Whitney Cummings said elsewhere, not written here
Overthinking. I tend to conflate the amount of time spent on something with how good it is. Sometimes intuition is better than proof, and gut instinct better than hours of “work.”

Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 15 April 2017 source ↗

Others on this question

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Eddie Glaude Jr. Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University
Impatience. My mind moves rapidly.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 8 July 2017 source ↗
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Structural biologist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 2009
Often, what happens in science is you got a problem and you solve it, and then there’s not much else to do and you have to move on. But the ribosome turned out to be a rather rich gold mine. Perhaps I’m a little intellectually lazy and feel like, “Why should I bother thinking about something else?” Maybe at some point, I should have thought, “I should do something different.”
Recorded Academy of Achievement interview source ↗
Celeste Ng Novelist
I don’t believe anything is black and white, so I’m always searching for nuance. On the whole I think this is a positive thing, but it also means I almost never give an unqualified answer.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 5 August 2017 source ↗

More from Whitney Cummings

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Question Which book changed the way you think, and what did it change? Taste & recommendation
I believe that I had something called epigenetic imprinting, which I actually read about in a book called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. Not to self-promote too much, but I loved it so much I wrote a movie with a brilliant comedian named Neil Brennan and made the move this year. That’s how profoundly it changed my life, because I believe that the more we know about our neural brain wiring, the more freedom we have and the more patience we have with ourselves.
Recorded Tim Ferriss, The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, 21 June 2018 source ↗

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