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

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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 ↗
Bill Nye Science communicator and television presenter
Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 17 June 2017 source ↗
Charlie Munger Vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, 1978–2023
inversion frequently will solve problems which nothing else will solve. And in life, unless you’re more gifted than Einstein, inversion will help you solve problems that you can't solve in other ways.
Recorded USC Gould School of Law commencement, 2007, Speakola, 2007 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 ↗

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