The question

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.

Zeynep Tufekci

Professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University

Recorded 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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Winston Churchill Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964
They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn. Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn. In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet. I do not at all excuse myself for this foolish neglect of opportunities procured at so much expense by my parents and brought so forcibly to my attention by my Preceptors.
Recorded Chapter of his autobiography, written at Chartwell in 1930, Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (Thornton Butterworth, 1930), Project Gutenberg Canada, October 1930 source ↗
Eddie Glaude Jr. Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University
Impatience. My mind moves rapidly.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 8 July 2017 source ↗
Adam Zagajewski Poet and essayist
But it seems to me that I’m somebody who is deeply skeptical and trying to combat this skepticism. So my writing is probably situated somewhere between the poles of skepticism and ecstasy, with my dream being to have more ecstatic poems.
Recorded Agnieszka Tennant, Christianity Today, June 2010 source ↗

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Alan Shepard, Bill Nye, Lisa Randall, Celeste Ng, Winston Churchill

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