Bad Advices: Think Positive

Everybody tells you to think positive. This alone should give a hint that there must be something fishy...

Of course not.! Think positive only means: Don't Think At All! Thinking inherently is about making discriminations.

It is focusing on something concrete, at hand, and finding the problem. Or among all possible problems, finding the ones for which there might be a solution, or the ones that are truly unbearable, or the ones the cheapest to fix.

Think Negative!

Positivity is only carelessness, or bullshit: abstraction of things ignored (instead of of things well-known and too abundant).

In fact, positive is most of the time just double negative: think positive means be afraid of seeming to think by yourself, and thus possibly disagree.

-- MarcGirod - 22 Aug 2008

similarly, you get corporations that talk about a 'can do' attitude - implying that worrying about technical debt is inappropriate. I recal coming across a paper in which the author's had measured the long term impact of 'can do' - showing that its geared towards offloading responsibility for long term growth, and increasing focus on short term goals - causing a loss of clean design.

-- SvenDowideit - 02 Aug 2010