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 Courtney Maum said elsewhere, not written here
I’m too quick to jump to a negative conclusion. For example, if I’ve had a book come out recently and I’m with a friend who doesn’t mention it, instead of thinking, “This person hasn’t mentioned my book because they’re busy and haven’t had time to purchase it, much less read it, and that doesn’t mean that they don’t like me,” I will go to, “This person doesn’t care about me,” which is such a terrible, self-centered way to think. People really are busy and their world doesn’t stop just because I’ve published a novel.

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

Others on this question

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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 ↗
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 ↗
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 ↗

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