Benefits of Appreciative Thinking

It's a western issue and to be more specific, its an American issue. It's a quintessential residue (which is a gross  understatement) when the essence of "self-reliance" is misused or misunderstood (earlier post here). In other words it's hard for some people to appreciate ideas of others (esp. grand ones not the routine chorus at work) and it's evident from the scarcity of role models in this country and overabundance of contrarians offering no alternatives except lots of ad hominem. Trust me, its frustrating since some people think they know everything (Epistemological Modesty, anybody?) and they dwell on this fallacy by constant criticism, which is self-depreciating and of-course they are oblivious to that fact and thrive in their phantasmagorical creation feeling omnipotent. I cannot even begin to write these experiences since there are so many and worse, lot of otherwise very nice people dwell on this fallacy. Having the privilege of influenced by both east and west, this fallacy seems obvious from my perspective but it might not for someone without a dose of eastern thoughts or well .. the good old self-reflection, metacognition. Seth has a fantastic post, most of it targetting the academic circles but the last line vindicates my hypothesis:

"To learn appreciative thinking is to learn to appreciate, to learn to see the value of things. More or less the opposite of critical thinking.When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help students see such aspects of a paper as:

1. What can we learn from it? What new ideas does it suggest? What already-existing plausible ideas does it make more plausible or less plausible?
2. How is it an improvement over previous work? Does it use new methods? Does it use old methods in a new way? Do it show a better way to do something?
3. Did the authors show good taste in their choice of problem? Is this a problem both important and possibly solvable?
4. Are details done well? Is it well-written? Is the context of the work made clear? Are the data well-analyzed? Does it make good use of graphs? Is the discussion imaginative rather than formulaic?
5. What’s interesting or enjoyable about it?

That sort of thing. In my experience few papers are worthless. But I’ve heard lots of papers called worthless.

The overemphasis — the total emphasis — on critical thinking has big and harmful consequences on graduate students. At Berkeley, in a weekly seminar called Animal Behavior Lunch, we would discuss a recent animal behavior paper. The dozen-odd graduate students could only find fault. Out of hundreds and hundreds of comments, I cannot remember a single positive one from a graduate student. Sometimes a faculty member would intervene: “Let’s not be too negative. . . . ” But week after week it kept happening. Relentless negativity caused trouble for the graduate students because every plan of their own that they thought of, they placed too much emphasis on what was wrong with it. Trying to overcome the problems, their research became too big and complicated. For example, they ran control groups before obtaining the basic effect. They had been very poorly taught — by all those professors who taught critical thinking."

One of the most obvious message from Malcom Galdwell's (irrespective of our love/hate relationship with Galdwell) Outliers was "No one in the history of the world has reached the top alone." (Gladwell concludes in a chapter comparing a high IQ failure named Chris Langan with the brilliantly successful J. Robert Oppenheimer, "not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone".)