Ben Casnocha asks what I mean by appreciative thinking. A good question, since I invented the phrase. 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.

That I had to make up a phrase shows the problem. I have complained many times about an overemphasis on critical thinking at universities. Sometimes I’d say, “Have you ever heard the term appreciative thinking? No? How many times have you heard the term 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? Does 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.

President Nixon made some anti-Ivy-League comments. Here is how one Ivy-League college president recently responded:

David Skorton, the president of Cornell, was apprised of Nixon’s comments over the phone. “My mouth is open,” Skorton said, after the line went quiet. “Gosh, what a negative thing to say. Ivy League schools, like all good universities, teach people to think and to reason, and why would anyone be against that?”

To think and to reason. Now and then I’d hear a Berkeley professor say he taught his students “to think”. When they’d say it to me I’d ask what they meant by thinking. It always turned out that they meant critical thinking, seeing what’s wrong with this or that. Never appreciative thinking. This was like a flight school teaching take-offs but not landings. It also always turned out that they were teaching their students how to be like professors–teaching professorial job skills, in other words. To call those job skills “thinking” was like saying the world ended at the nearest river. Sure, their job involved thinking but other jobs also involved thinking, of a much different sort — were they not aware of this?

In an article in the Financial Times, Nassim Taleb and Pablo Triana write:

Risk methods that failed dramatically in the real world continue to be taught to students in business schools, where professors never lose tenure for the misapplications of those methods. As we are writing these lines, close to 100,000 MBAs are still learning portfolio theory — it is uniformly on the programme for next semester. An airline company would ground the aircraft and investigate after the crash — universities would put more aircraft in the skies, crash after crash.

Years ago, a cousin of mine was fond of saying something similar. He was majoring in English at UCLA. He didn’t think much of his professors. “What happens when a professor is wrong?” he would ask. “When an engineer is wrong, the bridge falls down. When a doctor is wrong, the patient dies. What happens when an English professor is wrong?” The answer, of course, was “nothing”. Now we will find out what happens when finance professors are wrong.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

From an article about bureaucratic suppression of Indian higher education:

Mr. Rao says space requirements are calculated to ensure students have the room to learn. “For quality education, you need enough space — enough space for labs, for teaching. Our experts decide based on these requirements after examining world-class universities.”

Richard Feynman criticized what he called cargo-cult science — pseudo-science (including my area, animal learning) that had the appearance of science but didn’t actually work. Mr. Rao’s beliefs about what quality education requires are based, like cargo cults, on what is easy to see.

I watched the election returns Wednesday morning in a totally packed Beijing cafe. Two McCain supporters, maybe 80 Obama supporters. I had to leave a little early; what I had thought was a dinner invitation was a lunch invitation, I had learned the day before. I sat next to two students from Harvard studying at Tsinghua. They found Tsinghua students more passive than Harvard students. I told them the story about the Berkeley prof who liked teaching Tsinghua students but not Berkeley students. Do Harvard profs like teaching? I asked. Their answer was vague. They told me about Tsinghua students, not to mention Harvard students, agonizing over the personal statements required with grad school applications. I told them that I’d seen thousands of those statements and no one in my department (at Berkeley) cared about anything but (a) do you want to be a professor? (the correct answer is yes) (b) do you want to work with me (the prof reading it)? and (c) your research experience. Once I came upon one that was unusually interesting and well-written and I said, “hey look at this person” but no one else agreed with me. When Obama was projected to win Ohio I figured he would win. The cheers of the crowd when the Ohio win was announced reminded me of when I watched a World Cup final, France versus Brazil, in a room full of French students and France scored a goal.

Thank god we have a president who understands Jane Jacobs.