My Bad Intellectual Habits

Broheim, know thyself.

Random Camus photo, selected explicitly for the illusion of profundity

A byproduct (and possible boon) of being in your thirties is you have enough historical data about your life that you can start making outsized optimizations to the way you run the business of you. In my case, I am finally able to chart, using decades as narrative structure, the evolution of my mind and my intellect.

I do not like the word ‘intellectual’ as it’s used in prosaic discourse, where it becomes a gatekeeping tool—marking one person as an ‘intellectual’ and another as idiot or anti-intellectual. For the purpose of this piece, when I use the word ‘intellectual’, I only mean ‘pertaining to the intellect’. I make no claim of ‘smarts’ or ‘intelligence’ beyond that.

Before listing out the bad intellectual habits (that have cost me a lot of productivity and stride), I’d like to explain the type of person I am, as grounding context.

whoami

I am a man, working in technology, who definitely has ADHD, and (according to random encounters in the past) may be autistic. As a result, I am distracted, irritable and constantly missing the forest for the trees. It’s not all bad, however: I find that I think on my feet faster than the average person, have a natural bias for action in lieu of deliberation, and can switch interests and domains at will, at least in theory.

(In practise, however, my interests drive me, not the other way ‘round: I am powerless to whatever ‘arrests’ me).

I have picked up a handful of traits to help me move through life as painlessly as possible. Some of them have been useful, most of them have been disastrous.

I will list, now, the worst intellectual habits I’ve picked up with time.

Arguing

Arguing as a way to explore the contours of an actionable idea is not only a waste of time, but it also dissipates my energy. I realize, now, that instead of actually experimenting and testing my theories through actual work, I’ve unwittingly replaced work with intellectual exercises. Thought experiments. Elaborate tools of interlocution that give me the same afterglow as having brought something meaningful into the world.

Arguing isn’t the issue. The energy cost is, and I must figure out the best way to manage it. My intuition is to completely eliminate arguing altogether, but we’ll see.

Overthinking

I had a sort of ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ approach to life that served me well in my youth. It’s why I loved the idea of sprezzatura (and even wrote, rather lovingly, about the concept).

I love to make things and share them with people, but working in tech for nearly a decade has made me pick up the intellectual traits that better serve groups: deliberation, consensus, brainstorming, stakeholder buy-in.

Yet—I am not a group of people. I am one person. I don’t need to do a SWOT analysis and consider the ‘logic’ and ‘n-order effects’ of anything I do. I really do need to get out of my way and ship.

The more thoughtful and deliberate I’ve become, the grayer my GitHub graph has gotten. And that’s only representing the wider issue.

A fixation on precision

It follows from overthinking that I fixate on the object-level harmony of the concepts and ideas I’m engaging with. Even a slightly incorrect definition or implementation has started to cause me intense amounts of distress lately.

This was not always the case. I used to be more comfortable with vagueness and incorrect definitions.

Self-censoring

This is probably by far the worst one, and quite literally the reason I’m writing this once, without giving it the once-over.

I used to have an authentic online voice. It was a bad voice, to be sure, but it was authentic; the sort of outcome where when people read something by you, they could tell you wrote it.

I neutered my writing voice to blend with the homogeneous stew of thought leadership, and I frankly think this may have been my greatest mistake in life.

Because I write in a deliberately-constrained way, I have lost all interest in writing or self-expression, since I don’t even sound like myself even to me. My writing makes me wince less, true, but it also makes me not want to read what I wrote, since it doesn’t sound like me at all.

This article marks a hopeful return to writing without thinking, with editing only for the purpose of clarity.

Clever == Good

I find myself falling prey to the notion that if an argument or thought sounds clever, then it must be good. Recent life events have made me rediscover an appreciation and respect for simple, mundane truths.

The second outcome of this is that I started to enjoy being clever rather than clear.

I tickle myself, but I, alone, laugh.

Blending in

I hold a few beliefs that I have selected purely for homeostasis with arbitrary communities I find myself a part of. These beliefs aren’t inherently wrong—most of them are morally correct, at least. The point is, even though I hold these beliefs and profess them with as much integrity as I can muster, I am aware that I did not do the due diligence to arrive at these beliefs.

The above may seem like such a trivial thing to be concerned about, but the question is “to what degree would I lower my epistemic standards for social cohesion?”

I suspect that I had more interesting ideas when I was (relative to my current self) a social hermit. I have become rewarded with camaraderie the more I inch towards the middle of the behavioral bell curve, which incentivizes me to acquire more affinity-seeking beliefs.

I won, but at what cost?

Watching videos

It’s funny, but it’s true. I have always known that text was my ideal medium, but my languor eventually saw to it that I started to consume more video content than text content.

For the most part, if you curate video well, you can offset the often ‘calorie-free’ nature of the medium. But the issue is the medium itself lends itself greatly to waffling.

Even when I find a video with material comparative to a good book on the subject in view, I find that I get more insight per unit engagement with a book. The book is slow, but when I finish, I’m significantly well-versed compared to if I watched a video.

Some part of this is no fault of video. I am very distracted, remember, and I do not think I’ve ever been able to watch a sufficiently-long video end-to-end, and the only videos worth my time are often long.

This seems like a good place to end this piece for now. I may revisit if I find more weaknesses in my intellectual habits.

If not, now you know something about me.