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 Zeynep Tufekci said elsewhere, not written here
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.

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

Others on this question

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Fareed Zakaria Journalist and author; host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS
Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 20 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 ↗
Dominique Dawes Olympic gymnast; three-time Olympian and gold medallist
My worst intellectual habit has to be overanalyzing everything. I do it all the time, because there are too many options in this world.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 24 June 2017 source ↗

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