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.
Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 13 May 2017 source ↗
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.”
I have the same academic disease that any academic will understand, that I get focused on the interesting because that’s appealing to me. Most of the time, most answers are boring. “It’s a respiratory disease. Wear a mask.” That’s a boring example. Trying to be too clever, too smart, almost too contrarian sometimes — I would say that is something that I fight in myself because, like a lot of academics and a lot of intellectual people, I like the answers that surprise me.
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.”
Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.
Tim Harford, Warren Buffett, Adam Gopnik, Alain de Botton, Bill Nye, Celeste Ng
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