The question
Which thinking habit do you wish you could break?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.
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.
Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 5 August 2017 source ↗
Rushing to judgment. Looking for the bad in someone else before anything else.
Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.
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.”
I question everything. This is also my greatest intellectual habit.
Well, I almost never agree with anything anyone in the current administration says, but I read their press releases and interviews and late-night tweets regularly, because I need to stay informed.
Whitney Cummings, Henry Rollins, Alain de Botton, Courtney Maum, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adam Gopnik
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