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 Tim Harford said elsewhere, not written here
I probably want to be liked too much. This is one difference between me and Steve Levitt . Steve Levitt is also much smarter than me and much more successful than me. And that doesn’t bother me at all, but he said he also doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him, or doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks about him. I actually do care what people think about me. I’d quite like people to think I’m a nice guy, so I’m probably self-censoring at times. Say, maybe I won’t say that because people wouldn’t like that. And that’s probably a fault in a newspaper columnist — you probably shouldn’t care what people think about you, but that’s the way it is.

Tyler Cowen, Conversations with Tyler podcast, published transcript source ↗

Others on this question

View all 20 →
Mark Cuban Entrepreneur and investor; owner of the Dallas Mavericks
I’ll get half way through a book and then jump to another.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 13 May 2017 source ↗
Sarah Perry
I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 26 August 2017 source ↗
Adam Gopnik Staff writer at The New Yorker; essayist
My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 16 September 2017 source ↗
Zeynep Tufekci Professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University
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.
Recorded Tyler Cowen, Conversations with Tyler podcast, published transcript source ↗

More on craft & work

Also answered this · A–Z

Mark Cuban, Warren Buffett, Adam Gopnik, Alain de Botton, Bill Nye, Celeste Ng

Search the directory for somebody in particular.

Explore further

Report this answer